Moving to IaaS: Big Changes Required

There are some huge opportunities for improvements in moving enterprise services to the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, but there are some equally daunting challenges -- both technical and operational.

Demand for public cloud infrastructure, or IaaS, was expected to grow 36.8% in 2018, according to Gartner. IaaS refers to the basic computing, networking, and storage services supplied by the big three providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The cloud allows your infrastructure to scale dynamically but requires a fundamentally different approach than premises-based infrastructure. You cannot do everything the same as you did in a private data center.

(Image: Pixabay)

Comparing IaaS and a private data center is fairly difficult in itself. There are more differences than there are similarities. The similarities essentially end after you refer to them both as virtual environments. An argument could be made that this is not even similar, as most private data centers only virtualize the compute and storage, whereas the major IaaS providers virtualize nearly everything, including services, network, and the data center itself.

These differences require your IT operations team to have a very different approach and skill sets, but at the same time, IaaS opens the door for some significant improvements to operational efficiencies and costs.

Read the rest of this article here.