Is It Time for Your Business to Adopt IaaS?

In the course of daily transactions, businesses generate huge amounts of data. Recent data breaches have gotten every organization worried about the security of their data, but security is not the only challenge businesses face with data storage. There are also issues relating to storage capacity and data access.

A convenient solution would be to find a cloud computing service that can provide virtualized computing resources over the internet. One such service is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company. But is IaaS suitable for everyone, and is it time for your own organization to adopt IaaS?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Image via Flickr by Ronald Lewis

According to Gartner, Inc., the growth in worldwide public cloud services market is on the rise. Most of that growth was projected to come from Infrastructure as a Service. As of 2016, the upward trajectory is expected to be maintained going forward.

Constrained by budget limitations, small businesses are faced with the increasing cost of housing their own infrastructure components in a data center within their premises, so many small businesses are moving over their IT workload to an IaaS company.

Such a company will provide an alternative to physically warehousing data storage infrastructure within the organization. It also facilitates access to online computing applications and enhances the ability of the business to scale as their demand increases, since the cost of using the service is based on rate of usage.

Which Companies Need to Deploy IaaS
Organizations, especially the small to medium businesses that must gain the confidence of their clients in their ability to secure the safety of their data, should transition to the new IaaS technology at some point. As the company's workload increases, it is imperative to consider moving over to IaaS. The IaaS strategy is also effective when the workload is temporary or experimental.

Before Migrating to IaaS
Before migrating applications or services to the new IaaS technology, it is essential to make sure that the company's operating systems are compatible with the cloud. Some legacy applications may rely on specific hardware to function, and they may require re-engineering into a working state before they can be migrated.

If a significant percentage of the organization's computing workloads are not ready for cloud computing infrastructure, it is probably a good idea for such an organization to wait.

It is also important to review the company's own security and compliance requirements to make sure that they will be adequately served in an IaaS environment. In the same vein, specific software licenses should be reviewed to make sure that there will be no breach of contract by moving the software to an off-site infrastructure.

In selecting a suitable company for this service, cloud computing users must make sure that they engage an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company that can implement innovative cloud security and best practices, so that the potential impact of any attempt at security breach can be significantly reduced.

In general, adopting Infrastructure as a Service presents companies a unique opportunity to save costs when scaling their business. In addition, it provides greater data security and more flexibility for company employees since resources can be accessed over the internet.