Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Providers of IaaS offer a selection of computers - physical or more often virtual machines.  These Pools of machines which operate as guests within the cloud support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines with the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.

IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles.

IaaS-cloud services supply these resources on-demand from their large pools installed in data centres for wide-area connectivity, with customers using either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks).

To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software.

Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis and the cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.

Examples of IaaS providers include:

• Amazon EC2
• Google Compute Engine
• HP Cloud
• Joyent
• Linode
• NaviSite
• Rackspace
• Ready Space

Cloud communications and cloud telephony, rather than replacing local computing infrastructure, replace local telecommunications infrastructure with Voice over IP and other off-site Internet services.

For more details, please contact the sales team.