What is IaaS? Infrastructure as a Service | Microsoft Azure (2024)

IaaS eliminates the cost of configuring and managing a physical datacenter, which makes it a cost-effective choice for migrating to the cloud. The pay-as-you-go subscription models used by IaaS providers help you reduce hardware costs and maintenance and enable your IT team to focus on core business.

IaaS lets you scale globally and accommodate spikes in resource demand. That way, you can deliver IT resources to employees from anywhere in the world faster and enhance application performance.

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 assures that your infrastructure is reliable and meets service-level agreements (SLAs).

Achieving high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery is expensive because it requires a significant amount of technology and staff. But with the right SLA in place, IaaS helps to reduce this cost. It also helps you access applications and data as usual during a disaster or outage.

With the appropriate service agreement, a cloud service provider can offer better security for your applications and data than the security you would attain in house.

With IaaS, once you've decided to launch a new product or initiative, the necessary computing infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks. And because you don't need to set up the underlying infrastructure, IaaS lets you deliver your apps to users faster.