Some of you out there may have heard of this developing trend. A lot of the heavy hitting providers out there have begun the competition on the pricing structures for this service. So what is infrastructure as a service or (IaaS)? It's quite simple actually. It's merely a provisioning model where companies can lease equipment in the cloud for whatever they see fit. As a customer you pay a monthly fee for the leasing of another company's equipment instead of purchasing your own and setting up your own cage in a data center somewhere that your IT staff will have to manage in person as well as remotely.

There are of course advantages and disadvantages to this. The advantages are you don't have to show up at a data center for network discovery of new equipment installation and hook up. All of the layer one network responsibilities fall onto the provider. You also won't have to worry about backups, incremental or otherwise. Furthermore redundancy and failover are also non-issues.

The disadvantages, like with anything, are certainly there as well. In these instances, when it comes to security, you are at the mercy of whomever you signed with. For some businesses with sensitive information, banks especially, this type of security may not be adequate for your needs. You are also responsible for your own upgrades of tools, database systems, and underlying infrastructure itself. If you have certain technical needs that require mandatory pieces of hardware, you're relatively out of luck. There may also be legal reasons as to why you are unable to keep certain aspects of your data storage off shore or off-premises.

Either way, its just another option for the business owner who enjoys a variety of choice. Just know that with any big technical decision or deployment, one must weigh both the pros and cons of that service and how viable it is for your particular business. Options are something we excel at providing at Gilded Pendulum. If you'd like to know exactly what yours are, we can help.

Infrastructure as a Service...