Services that are consumed from IaaS offerings include compute services such as virtual machine instances, block storage, private network segments, and network function devices that allow for connectivity, such as routers, NAT, firewalls, and so on. These resources are fairly standard units of computing that are commonly found in any enterprise environment. Therefore, the value of IaaS is that a cloud computing tenant can mirror their environment completely in the cloud and use these services. This can be very useful in the following circumstances:

• When strict policies of low-level operating system access are required
• For solutions such as backup and disaster recovery
• For hybrid solutions between on-premise and cloud servers, and so on

The drawback of IaaS is that there will still be a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done to bring an application to life. For instance, in IaaS, we get a fresh operating system that needs to be optimized, services and applications that need to be installed, patched, secured, and kept safe, as well as periodically updated and upgraded. This can bring a lot of overhead and complexity to deployment as the environment is extended into the cloud and more virtual machine instances, storage volumes, network environments, and so on will need to be maintained, secured, and operated by the enterprise itself. The highest level of IT knowledge is required to use and configure IaaS, but it does give us the most control over the resources we are configuring.