What are the business benefits of IaaS?
July 23, 2008 – 7:45 pmI was asked to summarise the benefits of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) to the business community over traditional server deployments.
I can only answer this from my personal prospective…but as a small business owner I can tell you that the benefit in IaaS is:
- in allowing startups access to infrastructure or CPU cycles that they usually cant access…due to cash or speed to deploy. I am thinking our own service emailcloud.com and the Animoto story here.
- in helping enterprises to process some periodic batch jobs…large transactional or process driven jobs and not the day to day stuff. I am thinking of the NYTimes story here.
- in providing tools or basic consulting for either of the above. I am thinking of Rightscale etc here.
I think that the various AWS services and Flexiscale are ‘on the money’ because they allow very simple access to all three.
One Response to “What are the business benefits of IaaS?”
Ross, you are correct with your points, but I think the benefits are much broader.
For example you can be paying for average resource utilization instead of peak. By scaling down the number of servers as the load drops you end up paying for the average between day & night, business day & week-end, etc.
Another benefit is business flexibility. You may want to set-up a beta preview deployment so the biz dev guys can show that to some important prospects before release. Or Engineering may need extra test deployments in the final stages before release.
By Thorsten - CTO RightScale on Jul 24, 2008