The iFish Group | Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service

The complex nature of the IT infrastructure that supports the organization presents a significant challenge for cost effective management and support. Hardware and software technology refresh costs occur every three to five years and the organization faces purchasing decisions based on changing business needs and evolving technology capabilities resulting in counter-cyclic waves of underutilized assets and end of life equipment. Combined with the complexity and costs of perpetual upgrades to server operating systems and application software, obtaining and retaining the diverse IT skills required to support the infrastructure can be problematic.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud service where organizations purchase infrastructure from a service provider in a pay-as-you-go model that offers a highly attractive, cost effective solutions that benefits both parties. The IaaS subscriber receive the benefit of technical competencies of the service provider and realizes the cost benefits of only paying for resources that are used. This large cost savings, especially during this economically sensitive time, in both hardware and staffing makes IaaS an extremely attractive alternative to the common approach of self-hosted infrastructure. According to Forrester research, 25% of enterprises are planning to adopt IaaS via an external provider. Many organizations are already reaping the cost benefits of this structure and are expanding outsourced IT across their technical landscape.

Here are some of the benefits IaaS has to offer:

Improved financial flexibility – Investments in IT infrastructure are capital intensive and are not as fiscally effective as licensing costs for organization with small user counts result in underutilized resources. By utilizing services from an IaaS provider licenses are “rented” monthly on a pay-as-you-go basis, either per user or per server, significantly reducing the upfront costs. Software upgrades are also provided at no additional cost.

A broad choice of available services – Since the cloud licensing models do not require large upfront investment, a broader offering of products can be made available. Most licenses are available on a per user model but some licensing such as antivirus, spam, intrusion detection and firewalls are available per virtual machine and can be very cost effective for subscribers.

A scalable infrastructure without increased complexity – As infrastructure grows so does the complexity. IaaS providers specialize in technologies that they employ to support their business alleviating the subscriber company from needing to possess the competencies necessary to support growing infrastructure.

Agility to respond to changing business needs – IaaS providers can more easily respond to changing business needs through pay-as-you-go services and software licensing costs that can both ramp up and ramp down according to subscriber’s business needs. Additional services and network bandwidth can be quickly ramped up to meet changing demand.

High availability SLAs based on fault tolerant technologies – IaaS providers can incorporate redundant systems to ensure business continuity in the event of failures due to equipment, facility or network. The redundant system costs can be spread amongst multiple subscribers and optional tiered service levels can be tailored to meet the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) requirements for individual companies and budgets.

Security from external threats such as intrusion, virus, malware and spam. – Sophisticated management tools that are traditionally cost prohibitive for smaller organizations can be used by IaaS providers on a per user or per server basis making the overall cost of implementation reasonable for individual subscribers.

Contact us today for more information to see how The iFish Group's IaaS plans can work for you.

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