Is Cloud Not A Part of Your Strategy: Think Twice!

Over the past few years, cloud computing has taken the business world by storm with its influential benefits that bring productivity, flexibility, and cost savings. A large number of organizations that look forward to outsource IT solutions is now turning to cloud tiers, particularly Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), to automate and virtualize their IT functionalities.

IaaS provides clients with an access to computing stacks, such as compute capacity, bandwidth, and storage capacity. Sensing the future of this cloud tier, many service providers have stepped in and enlisted IaaS as the part of their offerings. These benefactors are making efforts to prove that they are the best from the rest by designing developer-friendly features to augment the agility of end-users. Typically, every IaaS vendors follow similar pricing points and offers network, cloud storage, and computing capabilities.

The logical question that arises here is – if pricing and offerings are similar, then what factors differentiate leaders from the laggards?

The answer is, – services that empower the development and alleviate the intricacies of underlying IT tasks, like failover, orchestration, and automation.

According to a report, the market for IaaS cloud is in a state of upheaval. A number of companies are already running their business-critical applications or experimenting with Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The driving force behind this increased adoption is the positive ROI and reduced IT complexities, coupled by above-mentioned key business objectives.

Let us glean through some strategic benefits that businesses can derive from IaaS adoption:

Don’t let your focus be a growth cutter: Cloud IaaS providers are putting major efforts in making deployment and operational tasks easy to manage for their clients. They provide ultimate level of abstraction that eliminates the complexities, allied to both underlying applications and application stacks. This, in turn, frees IT teams from mundane infrastructure maintenance activities and lets them focus on other core projects that need their most attention. In this connection, a recent study conducted by a research firm suggests that businesses anticipating cloud IaaS admit that their IT professionals were able to focus on more their business strategies and goals.

Don’t let resource crisis to curtail performance: Other major benefits of switching to the cloud IaaS include rapid scale out and scale in. Most of the IaaS providers offer scaling of computing resources to meet emerging influx of data. Organizations can simply scale their computing resources to sustain the rapid upgrades and growth in performance. Let’s say, if you are running 1/O intensive workloads, you will get access to a long-term, and performance-driven storage to VMs without experiencing any downtime issues. Gain – resources can be provisioned on an on-demand basis that keeps your business’s performance uncompromised.

Total Cost of Ownership: It goes without saying that businesses that gear up for cloud IaaS save a lot. The costs allied – to hiring IT personnel, building, management, and planning, including the costs of IT infrastructure management and maintenance – get eliminated. Moreover, the Infrastructure as a Service is based on pay per use billing model. All such capital expenses are transferred to the IaaS vendor, allowing organizations to turn their capital expenses into operating expenses. The service can be customized as per the needs of the enterprise.

Guaranteed Uptime: Besides ensuring that customers’ needs are always met, the IaaS service providers guarantee high service availability, which is clearly mentioned in their service-level agreement (SLA). Partnering with a vendor – that not only supports dynamic infrastructure scaling, but also monitors and manages virtual server pools – makes IaaS a viable solution for businesses.

Curtails Catastrophic Circumstances: Every organization strives to put a well-documented disaster recovery plan, however, the technology supporting the same objective is often expensive. Companies that operate in different remote locations have different disaster recovery strategies and business continuity plans – which make the management virtually intricate. Here, IaaS is to rescue. It provides a holistic DR architecture, which slashes down operating costs and makes the management simple.

“A research determines that DR and BCP is one of the prime drivers behind IaaS adoption.”

— Frost & Sullivan

IaaS enables employees to gain access to the same infrastructure, such as email, web servers, and applications over a network, no matter what unforeseen situation may arrive. This, in turn, curtails the loss of critical data, thereby, improving the agility of a business.

Access to Advancing Technology: IaaS eliminates the need for procuring and managing IT equipment, and frees businesses from the hassle of upgrading and updating technologies. It goes without saying that buying upgrades can be a costly proposition, and clients that rely on their on-premise IT infrastructure are required to upgrade their equipment, or add capacity/features. In such cases, IaaS proves a beneficial bet as an organization does not need to worry about equipment, everything is taken care at service provider’s end.

Above and all, businesses adopting for IaaS cloud hosting model benefit from unilateral resource provisioning capabilities, rapid elasticity, latest technologies, and improved cash flow. Besides offering these business critical features, it also eliminates technology obsolescence and mundane management tasks, allowing organizations to grow and outflank their competitors.