Infrastructure as a Service

The following are the key points that describe IaaS:

• Unlike SaaS offerings, in IaaS, the customer is provided with IT resources, such as bare metal machines to run applications, hard disk for storage, and network cable for network capability, which they can customize based on their business model.

• In IaaS offerings, since the customer has full access to their infrastructure, they can scale their IT resources based on their application requirement. Also, in IaaS offerings, the customer has to manage the security of the application/resources, and needs to build disaster recovery models in case of sudden failures/crashes.

• In IaaS, services are on an on-demand basis, where the customer is charged on usage. So, it's the customer's responsibility to do cost analysis against their resources, which will help restrict them from exceeding their budget.

• It allows customers/consumers to customize their infrastructure based on the requirements of the application, then tear down the infrastructure and recreate it again very quickly and efficiently.

• The pricing model for IaaS-based services is basically on-demand, which means you pay as you go. You are charged as per your usage of resources and the duration of the usage.

• Amazon Web Services (offering Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)) was the first out of the gate in this cloud offering; however, players such as Microsoft Azure (virtual machine), Rackspace (virtual cloud servers) and Oracle (bare metal cloud services) have also made a name for themselves.