What Is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

How Does IaaS Work?

All cloud service models offer on-demand access to cloud services with built-in resiliency, high availability, and access to resources on an as-needed basis. Cloud customers pay for these services under a pay-as-you-go model where they only pay for the resources and services that they use.

With IaaS, compute, networking, and storage hardware devices are provided and managed by the cloud provider. Computational resources are commonly provided as preconfigured Virtual Machines or VMs (sometimes referred to as “instances”) that the customer can quickly deploy. Similarly, cloud providers offer virtualized storage and networking resources.

Benefits of IaaS

IaaS and other cloud deployment models are rapidly growing in popularity due to their many benefits. Some of the main selling points of IaaS include:

• Cost Savings: Cloud environments enable cloud customers to outsource responsibility for their underlying infrastructure. The pay-as-you-go model can provide significant cost savings compared to an on-prem data center where the company needs to pay for resources whether or not they are used. Cloud customers are able to reduce their up-front costs of purchasing physical infrastructure (CapEx) by moving to a monthly operating cost model (OpEx) by switching to a cloud environment.
• Flexibility and Scalability: Cloud providers use resource pooling to offer customers access to a set of available resources. This enables organizations to rapidly scale their cloud footprint up or down, and adapt to evolving business needs.
• Agility: IaaS allows companies to access virtualized network, storage, and compute resources in a managed environment. This permits significant agility since companies can deploy or spin down virtual resources on an as-needed basis.
• Simplified Management: IaaS outsources management of physical infrastructure to the cloud provider. This enables the organization to focus its resources on higher levels of its software stack.
• Redundancy and Fault Tolerance: Cloud service providers enable  fault tolerance and redundancy via multiple availability zones. This provides greater resiliency than many organizations can achieve with traditional data centers.
• Focus on core business: IaaS eliminates the responsibility of owning, deploying, maintaining and managing physical infrastructure. As a result, companies can focus their efforts and resources on their core business.

Infrastructure as a Service Security

With all cloud service models, an understanding of the cloud shared responsibility model is vital for cloud security. This model describes the security responsibilities of the cloud provider, the cloud customer, and those shared between them.

In an IaaS environment, the cloud customer is responsible for cloud computing security, including their virtual machines, storage, networking and the data and applications within them. To protect against multi-layer cloud security threats and ensure a robust cloud security posture, the cloud customer should implement a multi-layered and unified cloud security platform. The tools and services offered by cloud providers to help users uphold their end of the shared responsibility model are important elements of any cloud security solution. However, cloud providers are not specialists in security; these cloud provider tools and services must be complemented and enhanced by specialized partner solutions in order to achieve enterprise-grade cloud security.

A key foundational layer is cloud network security, where cloud customers should deploy virtual security gateways to provide next generation firewall capabilities of advanced threat prevention, traffic inspection and micro-segmentation. Such security solutions use multiple layered security technologies

including Firewall, IPS, Application Control, DLP and others.