Today, every business needs a certain amount of technology. The more that people depend on the Internet to manage their affairs and procure goods and services, the more businesses will need to focus on getting the IT infrastructure in place to help them succeed. Over the past several years we have begun to see a lot of businesses dipping their toe into the cloud computing pool. Many started with cloud backup and moved to some type of hosted software platform like hosted email through Outlook or Gmail or cloud-based productivity suites offered by Google and Microsoft. Today’s business is moving past these platforms and actively hosting their computing infrastructure online. It was only a few short years ago that this strategy was looked upon as far too risky. Let’s take a brief look at hosted infrastructure and its benefits.
What is Hosted Hardware?
Don’t worry, it’s never called that. Typically, it is known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and it is the procurement of a virtualized computing infrastructure hosted in the cloud. For a long time, companies would buy and maintain servers to store and disseminate information. As the business world started to trust cloud security more and more, companies began to consider just getting the computing they need in the cloud. Today, the cloud infrastructure market has pushed past $100 billion and is growing at over 14 percent per year.
Coinciding with this was a major shift in the way that cloud tools were sold. For a long time, you could get cloud-hosted desktop platforms where you would have all your applications and storage in a dashboard of sorts, but as application development became more sophisticated, huge companies took over the cloud market. The who’s who of Internet companies started selling cloud tools. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide hosted infrastructure packages that provide options to any business looking to refresh, expand, or completely revolutionize their company's central computing infrastructure.
IaaS provides companies with the on-demand computing resources they need. This includes network, storage, servers, and any platforms and software that is required to run the business. Not only does this give organizations the scalability to get exactly the amount of computing they need for their business, it also provides some of the following benefits:
- Better performance - Since your IaaS platform is managed and maintained by the service provider, businesses have access to more reliable and robust infrastructure than they would typically have if they purchased their own servers.
- Powerful security - For years, this was the big bug-a-boo with cloud platforms, but today, with evident security threats everywhere, cloud providers spare no expense to protect their infrastructure and their clients’ investments.
- Enhanced flexibility - By having access to basically unlimited computing resources, it gives an organization a lot of flexibility in their current and future IT decision making.
- Built-in redundancy - Not only is all of the computing infrastructure backed up and available, cloud providers have a lot of options to support Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity platforms.
- Consistent Pricing - Companies that utilize IaaS know their computing costs. While it isn’t the static price you see with Software-as-a-Service, IaaS does have pretty transparent pricing and gives businesses that know their underlying traffic to successfully predict their computing costs.
IaaS isn’t just for companies looking to get the powerful central computing infrastructure they need, without the massive expense of buying new servers, it is great for startups, established companies that are looking to expand their remote workforce, and more. If you would like to talk about joining the companies who are already using IaaS, give Business Solutions & Software Group a call today at (954) 575-3992.
