IaaS stands for infrastructure as a service and is effectively a cloud service for infrastructure such as servers, networking and storage. You as a customer then have a platform where you can log in and immediately start up new servers, configure networks between different servers, choose which ports in the firewall should be open to which servers and so on.
It is a very flexible solution for companies. The pricing for the solution is based on how much resources you use, and it is generally much more cost-effective to run small and medium-sized IT solutions in an IaaS cloud solution instead of operating the entire environment yourself.
Advantages of IaaS
- Flexible, fast and easy to increase or decrease resources and capacity
- No operation or maintenance on physical servers - we take care of that!
- Preliable and reliable platform
Disadvantages of IaaS – when not to choose IaaS?
- For very large solutions, a completely separate environment is more affordable
- When physical access to equipment is needed - with us, only our own technicians have access to the hardware
- If latency must be as low as possible – a cloud service is physically further away than a server in the same office. So if you have very high requirements to have as low a latency as possible, it may be a good idea to review the possibility of local servers on site instead of a cloud solution.
Examples of when IaaS should be used
A larger website or e-commerce - Do you have a more demanding website where a regular one web hosting is not enough, you may have your own server for the database or need root access to the web server. Then it is optimal to run one or more compute instances in our IaaS solution.
Backup solutions - If you have an IT solution elsewhere that you want to continuously save backups of, then you can send the backups to the IaaS solution.
Business systems / Business Intelligence - To save and perform calculations and analyzes of data, cloud computing instances are perfect.