Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a business model that delivers IT infrastructure like compute, storage, and network resources on a pay-as-you-go basis over the internet. You can use IaaS to request and configure the resources you require to run your applications and IT systems. You are responsible for deploying, maintaining, and supporting your applications, and the IaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the physical infrastructure. Infrastructure as a Service gives you flexibility and control over your IT resources in a cost-effective manner.
IaaS offers benefits to modern enterprises like the following:
Speed
You can provision any number of resources within minutes, testing, and launching new ideas to market much faster. You can focus on your core business activities because others fully manage the IT infrastructure and computing resources.
Performance
Cloud providers have geographically distributed data centers that you can use to scale up your applications in locations that are physically closer to your customers. This might not be possible on your own if you have a limited server capacity and geographic reach. IaaS solutions give you a lot more options that you can use to both increase compute performance and reduce network latency.
Reliability
IaaS providers, such as AWS, offer a highly reliable environment where replacement virtual machines can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and data centers. For example, the Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.99% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.
Backup and recovery
IaaS providers give you access to unlimited infrastructure for backup and disaster recovery. For example, you can duplicate your applications across multiple servers so that if one fails, another takes over. Similarly, you can sync data backups automatically and frequently to achieve redundancy and business continuity
Competitive pricing
IaaS is a cloud computing model in which customers pay only for the resources they use. Such a setup encourages more efficient IT resource management and promotes innovation by making cloud services affordable to small businesses.
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