What is IaaS?

Infrastructure as a service

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the Internet. It’s one of the four types of cloud services, along with software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and serverless.

IaaS quickly scales up and down with demand, only letting you pay for what you use. It helps you avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other data centre infrastructure. Each resource is offered as a separate service component, and you only need to rent a particular one for as long as you need it. A cloud computing service provider, such as Azure, manages the infrastructure, while you purchase, install, configure and manage your own software – operating systems, middleware and applications.

Hosted applications/apps

Development tools, database management, business analytics

Operating systems

Servers and storage

Networking firewalls/security

Data centre physical facility/building

Common IaaS business scenarios

Typical things businesses do with IaaS include:

Test and development. Teams can quickly set up and dismantle test and development environments, bringing new applications to market faster. IaaS makes scaling dev-test environments up and down quick and economical.

Website hosting. Running websites using IaaS can be less expensive than traditional web hosting.

Storage, backup and recovery. Organisations avoid the capital outlay for storage and complexity of storage management, which typically requires skilled staff to manage data and meet legal and compliance requirements. IaaS is useful for handling unpredictable demand and steadily growing storage needs. It can also simplify the planning and management of backup and recovery systems.

Web apps. IaaS provides all the infrastructure to support web apps, including storage, web and application servers, and networking resources. Organisations can quickly deploy web apps on IaaS and easily scale infrastructure up and down when demand for the apps is unpredictable.

High-performance computing. High-performance computing (HPC) on supercomputers, computer grids or computer clusters helps solve complex problems involving millions of variables or calculations. Examples include earthquake and protein folding simulations, climate and weather predictions, financial modelling and evaluating product designs.

Big data analysis. Big data is a popular term for massive data sets that contain potentially valuable patterns, trends and associations. Mining data sets to locate or tease out these hidden patterns requires a huge amount of processing power, which IaaS provides economically.

Advantages of IaaS

Eliminates capital expense and reduces ongoing cost. IaaS sidesteps the upfront expense of setting up and managing an on-site data centre, making it an economical option for start-ups and businesses testing new ideas.

Improves business continuity and disaster recovery. Achieving high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery is expensive, as it requires a significant amount of technology and staff. But with the right service level agreement (SLA) in place, IaaS can reduce this cost, meaning you can access applications and data as usual during a disaster or outage.

Innovate rapidly. As soon as you’ve decided to launch a new product or initiative, the necessary computing infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than the days or weeks (and sometimes months) it could take to set up internally.

Respond more quickly to shifting business conditions. IaaS enables you to quickly scale up resources to accommodate spikes in demand for your application – during the holidays, for example – then scale resources back down again when activity decreases to save money.

Focus on your core business. IaaS frees up your team to focus on your organisation’s core business rather than on IT infrastructure.

Increase stability, reliability and supportability. With IaaS, there’s no need to maintain and upgrade software and hardware or troubleshoot equipment problems. With the appropriate agreement in place, the service provider ensures that your infrastructure is reliable and meets SLAs.

Better security. With the appropriate service agreement, a cloud service provider can provide security for your applications and data that may be better than what you can attain in-house.

Gets new apps to users faster. Because you don’t need to first set up the infrastructure before you can develop and deliver apps, you can get them to users faster with IaaS.

Get started with Azure IaaS

Learn how Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) helps you quickly create a secure and scalable infrastructure – while reducing the time and money spent to plan, procure and manage it.

Quickly provision infrastructure for all of your workloads

Deploy hybrid environments consistent with your on-premises infrastructure

Protect your applications with security and management services

Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Save money and achieve more with Azure IaaS

The advantages of IaaS with Azure

Today’s businesses face significant challenges, from enabling a remote work infrastructure and responding to increased cyberattacks to managing reduced cash flow.

Take advantage of highly available, scalable and secure cloud infrastructure with Azure—and only pay for the resources that you use.

• Empower remote productivity with a seamless virtual desktop experience.
• Deliver efficiency with unified security and management capabilities.
• Save money by migrating to the cloud and getting more value from your existing investments.

Meet today’s challenges with infrastructure from Microsoft Azure

See how to improve employee productivity, protect your data and networks, and reduce your IT expenses.

Empower remote work anywhere

Build remote work infrastructure to quickly deploy virtual desktops and apps and securely connect to any resource.

Enable business continuity

Adopt simple, cost-effective cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions to avoid costly business disruptions.

Secure your organisation

Protect your workloads and networks with industry-leading intelligence and built-in security controls.

Efficiently run hybrid environments

Manage and govern servers, Kubernetes clusters and apps across on-premises and multicloud from a single control plane.

Save money with migration

Improve cash flow, reduce IT costs and increase operational efficiency by migrating Windows Server, SQL and Linux workloads to the cloud.

Simplify and accelerate SAP migration

Bring the intelligence, security and reliability of Azure to your mission-critical SAP apps.

Modernise on-premises infrastructure

Optimise your price performance by consolidating on-premises apps on cloud-connected hyperconverged infrastructure.

Optimise workload costs

Continuously optimise the cost of your Azure workloads with tools and best practices to monitor, analyse and forecast your spend.

Build infrastructure solutions with Azure IaaS services and products

Compute

Access cloud compute capacity, virtualisation and scale on demand—and only pay for the resources you use.

Storage

Scale and secure cloud storage for your data, apps and workloads.

Networking

Connect your cloud and on-premises infrastructure securely on a global scale.

Security

Protect your workloads and infrastructure with built-in security services and unparalleled intelligence.

Management

Simplify, automate and optimise the management and compliance of your cloud resources.

Windows Virtual Desktop

Support Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and scale virtualised Windows desktops and apps.

Hybrid cloud solutions

Deliver innovation across your on-premises, multicloud and edge environments.

High-performance computing (HPC)

Run compute-intensive workloads with maximum performance, scalability and cost efficiency.

Windows Server on Azure

Take advantage of seamless hybrid operations, unmatched security and big cost savings by running Windows Server on Azure.

Linux on Azure

Conveniently run and manage your apps with your favourite Linux distribution on Azure.

SAP on Azure

Bring the intelligence, security and reliability of Azure to your SAP applications.

Azure VMware Solution

Run your VMware workloads natively on Azure and provision your environment within minutes.

Customers are doing great things with Azure IaaS

Get the latest Azure IaaS news and resources

Frequently asked questions

• What is infrastructure as a service (IaaS)?

This is the most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks and operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

A virtual machine (VM) behaves like a server—a computer within a computer that provides the user the same experience they would have on the host operating system itself. In general, VMs are sandboxed from the rest of the system, meaning that the software inside a virtual machine can not escape or tamper with the underlying server itself. Each VM provides its own virtual hardware including CPUs, memory, hard drives, network interfaces and other devices.

Azure Virtual Machines are the Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) used to deploy persistent VMs with nearly any server workload that you want. They are image service instances that provide on-demand and scalable computing resources with usage-based pricing.

Azure Virtual Machines are optimised for general purpose or storage, memory, compute and graphics-intensive workloads and are offered in a variety of types and sizes to meet your needs and keep your budget in check.

Azure Disk Storage is high-performing, highly durable block storage designed to be used with Azure Virtual Machines. With unmatched resiliency, seamless scalability and built-in security, Azure Disk Storage delivers the price-performance you need for your mission and business-critical applications.

The Azure global network is one of the largest global networks, available in more than 60 regions and consisting of more than 165,000 miles of private fiber. The Azure global network and services follows a Zero Trust approach when it comes to security and connects distributed workloads and locations across the world, enabling you to deliver your hybrid and cloud-native applications securely and efficiently, with low-latency.

In general, hybrid cloud computing refers to a cloud environment that combines public cloud and on-premises infrastructure, including private cloud, by allowing data and apps to be shared between them. It expands your cloud deployment options, offering greater flexibility to scale resources and take advantage of cloud tech innovations, while giving interoperability with on-prem environments.

Discover unique hybrid capabilities with Azure that give you the flexibility to innovate anywhere in your on-premises, multicloud and edge environments.

Scale your mission-critical applications on Azure, without compromising performance and protect your most valuable data with compliance and security certifications. Tailor your cloud infrastructure to host your business-critical apps or let Azure do it for you with managed services. Run your workloads on Linux and Windows, tapping into an open platform with a vibrant ecosystem.

Cloud services providers sometimes call cloud computing services a «stack», because they build on top of one another. While infrastructure as a service (IaaS) represents the most basic services in the stack, other services are often used together with IaaS, such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and serverless computing.

PaaS refers to services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing apps. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without having to set up or manage the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases needed for development.

SaaS is a method for delivering software apps—on demand and typically on a subscription basis. Cloud providers offer SaaS to host and manage software apps and underlying infrastructure and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the app over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet or PC.