What Infrastructure as a Service Means to You

Even if you aren’t using IaaS now, it’s very likely that your future hybrid environment will incorporate this practical, flexible, and cost-effective cloud service. What does this mean to you?

Think about how you’re getting your services.

Understand which services include a set of well-defined interfaces and which ones will lock you into a complex set of services that will be difficult to move away from.

Know why you’re using a cloud service. For example, if you need some temporary capacity to test a new application, your requirements will be very different than if you’re creating an application that will operate in a cloud.

In addition to understanding potential cloud gains, become familiar with how your infrastructure service provider handles the following capabilities:

Explicit definitions of service level agreements for availability, support, and performance (of provisioning more resource)

A utility computing billing arrangement, relating cost to actual resource use in a measured way

A virtualization environment that enables the configuration of systems (for compute power, bandwidth, and storage) as well as the creation of individual virtual machines (all to be available on an ad hoc basis)

A flexible, extensible, resource-rich environment that’s engineered for secure multi-tenancy (multiple users or tenants running the software in a shared environment on its servers)

Internet connectivity, including a web services interface to the customer’s management environment or its own management environment.