Infrastructure as a Service

Assignment 2.1

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is a popular option for IT managers, and State Tech magazine offers five reasons why: cost savings on hardware and infrastructure; capacity management and scalability; disaster recovery/business continuity; cost savings on IT staffing and administration; and innovation (5 Important Benefits, 2014).  

In terms of cost, an organization can circumvent the large capital expenditures needed for the hardware, servers, networking, processing and storage components of a data center – and the associated maintenance costs (Reed, 2014). In IaaS, you pay only for what you need, when you need it.  If the company is a start-up, IaaS is particularly attractive because a much smaller capital output for equipment is required, and savings are realized on the real estate that would be needed to house the equipment. A smaller infrastructure department also means smaller costs for IT staffing and administration.  

IaaS is particularly useful for a company whose capacity needs change during the year.  A company may be paying for a computer system large enough to handle its maximum capacity, yet use the maximum capacity only once or twice during the year. With IaaS, a company can scale up or down very quickly in response to its business needs.   And the pay-per-use model of IaaS ensures that they will only pay for the extra computing power when they need it.  (5 Important Benefits, 2014).  

The ability to recover quickly from a disaster and keep the business up and running with no downtime or loss of data is another extremely important advantage of using IaaS.  Rather than spending days in testing disaster recovery plans or sending backup media offsite to a secure location, a company can recover almost instantly from a disaster.  Employees can access, via the internet, the same infrastructure they have always used, from wherever they are located (5 Important Benefits, 2014).  

Lastly, instead of spending time maintaining a large technology infrastructure, a company using IaaS can focus on innovation and business growth (Kremian, 2014).

Some of the disadvantages of IaaS are (1) lack of control over the resources; (2) reliability of the infrastructure resource; (3) data security; (4) compatibility of existing infrastructure with the web-based service; (5) unexpected costs; and (6) contracts (Kremian, 2014).  With IaaS, the company relinquishes control of the infrastructure to its provider.  With providers competing for market share, there may be concerns about provider reliability and allocation of sufficient resources for business needs.  Security of data is also a risk when confidential customer data is involved.  One of the biggest disadvantages can be unexpected costs:  migrating to the cloud is expensive and every transaction costs money.  In addition, if a customer is locked into a contract with a particular service provider, this could be detrimental if the provider fails to live up to expectations (Kremian, 2014).