Information technology infrastructure, or IT infrastructure, refers to the combined components needed for the operation and management of enterprise IT systems.

Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS for short, is a cloud infrastructure that uses virtual hardware resources. These include; storage space, resources for networks or processors. The individual elements of the virtual infrastructure can be adapted, added and removed as desired. You can manage the IAAS yourself or have a partner such as SureSkills manage it for you.

The advantage is that due to the scalability of IaaS, the costs for companies can be designed according to their needs. With IaaS, it is not necessary to purchase hardware on a large scale, which in practice is not used all the time. Companies also have the option of implementing their own platforms and applications in an IaaS environment such as IBM Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

Infrastructure as a Service works on a shared responsibility model. With Infrastructure as a Service, the cloud provider is often responsible for the construction, operation and security of the hardware. Users, on the other hand, have the option of accessing the virtualized software resources of the provider.

IaaS solutions can generally be divided into three types: the public IaaS model, the private IaaS cloud and the hybrid cloud.

Low costs: By using IaaS solutions, companies can save on the costs of managing physical data centers. Usage-based pay-as-you-go models also reduces hardware, staffing and regular maintenance costs. 

Improved security: Service contracts offer users high security standards at all levels. The standards normally go beyond a company’s internal requirements. 

High stability: The service provider of an IaaS solution takes care of the administration, maintenance and updates of software and hardware. With corresponding agreements, companies ensure internal continuity and can continue to access software and data in the event of a technical failure, which can also be restored. 

More powerful workloads: With IaaS, a business can respond quickly when demand for resources increases. Storage and network resources can be scaled and provisioned quickly across the globe. 

Accelerating innovation: Applications and products emerge faster because the underlying IT infrastructure does not have to be set up first. The introduction of new products or software can take place within a few hours.

Dependence: The availability and security of Infrastructure as a Service is dependent on the cloud provider. A change of provider is also often associated with many technical difficulties because the basic infrastructure has to be replaced. 

Internet access: Companies need access to the internet to use the cloud service provider. Problems with the internet connection accordingly also lead to problems with the IaaS solution. 

Data protection: If the data center of the service provider of an IaaS solution is not located in your jurisdiction, the strict requirements of data protection authorities may not be met. This is a risk for users of IaaS that process sensitive information such as personal data.

Lift-and-shift migration: This is the fastest and least expensive method of migrating an application or workload to the cloud. Without refactoring an underlying architecture, you can increase the scale and performance, enhance the security, and reduce the costs of running an application or workload. 

Test and development: A team can quickly set up and dismantle test and development environments, bringing new applications to market faster. IaaS makes it quick and economical to scale dev/test environments up and down. 

Storage, backup, and recovery: Cloud solutions based on IaaS allow efficient storage of data and backups to be set up in just a few steps, which typically can require skilled staff to manage data and meet legal and compliance requirements. IaaS is useful for handling unpredictable demand and steadily growing storage needs. It also can simplify planning and management of backup and recovery systems. 

Hosting of website and web projects: IaaS provides the optimal foundation for complex web projects that have to deal with highly fluctuating demands. The scalability creates leeway to react to changing access numbers. 

Big data analysis – high performance computing: The unlimited scaling options enable high-performance computing even without supercomputers. This allows complex tasks with numerous variables to be solved and the analysis of large amounts of user data is no longer a problem.

In the past, most organisations relied on tape and spinning disks (HDD) for backups, maintaining multiple copies of their data and storing at least one at an offsite location. Today always-on digitally transforming world, tape backups in offsite repositories often cannot achieve the RTOs necessary to maintain business-critical operations. Planning the architecture for your disaster recovery solution involves replicating many of the capabilities of your production environment and will require you to incur costs for support staff, administration, facilities, and infrastructure. For this reason, many organizations are turning to companies like SureSkills for cloud-based backup solutions or full-scale Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

BaaS is only protecting the data, and not the infrastructure, it is typically less expensive than DRaaS. BaaS can be a good solution for companies that need to archive data or records for legal reasons, but most organizations who use BaaS will want to combine it with another disaster recovery tool to ensure business continuity. Planning for disaster and getting the help you need is something every business needs to consider. Whatever option you choose, a disaster recovery plan is essential for business continuity, and organisations are increasingly turning to DRaaS.