Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources via the internet. In an IaaS model, a cloud providers host the infrastructure components traditionally exist in an on-premises data center, including servers, storage and networking hardware, as well as the virtualization or hypervisor layer. The IaaS provider also supplies a range of services to accompany those infrastructure components. These can include detailed billing, monitoring, log access, security, load balancing and clustering, as well as storage resiliency, such as backup, replication and recovery. These services are increasingly policy-driven, enabling IaaS users to implement greater levels of automation and orchestration for important infrastructure tasks. For example, a user can implement policies to drive load balancing to maintain application availability and performance.