Infrastructure as a Service

Instead of owning your own servers and associated infrastructure, these computing resources can be provisioned as a service over the internet. Your data and applications are then migrated over onto the infrastructure that you access over the web. As far as all the users in the business are concerned, there is no difference – i.e. they can’t tell that the applications and data they are using are being served from a remote location rather than from the servers that used to be on your premises. You can also have a hybrid network, in other words some of your services are provided using your own servers and some are provided over the web but the users on your network can’t tell the difference.

Advantages of Infrastructure as a Service

Agility. If you need to provision a new IT service for the business this can be done really quickly – the new computing resources can be online within hours.

Flexibility. If your business needs to scale up (e.g. you win a large new order) or scale down (e.g. a big project ends) its IT, then this can be done rapidly to match your requirements. In contrast, if you own all your own infrastructure and need to upgrade it to provide more capacity, it usually takes at least 3 months to bring this new capacity on-stream.

Quality of Service. Because you are accessing an enterprise class facility which has been designed and built for capacity, resilience and security you will receive a better quality of service than you would from your own in-house infrastructure.

Financial. You only pay for what you use (including Microsoft licensing), and it is an Operating expense rather than a Capital expense. This is also a more cost effective way of providing the necessary computing resources than buying, housing, powering, maintaining and managing them yourself.

When might you adopt an Infrastructure as a Service solution?

If you want to upgrade a service or provide a new service and it requires new hardware, then you could provision this new service using an Infrastructure as a Service solution instead of buying new hardware. For example if you are on an old version of Microsoft Exchange for e-mail and wish to upgrade to the latest version, Exchange 2010, the new Exchange server can be provisioned as Infrastructure as a Service and connected into your network.

If you have a business project that requires IT resources for a limited amount of time, say 6 months, then buying hardware for this probably wouldn’t make sense.

Most businesses refresh their infrastructure every 3 to 4 years when it is at the end of its productive life and fully depreciated. If any or all of your infrastructure is now at this point then instead of buying replacement hardware you could migrate that workload to Infrastructure as a Service.

How can Northdoor help?

We offer a range of Infrastructure as a Service solutions and also migrate your data, applications and users to this service.

If you are interested in this service, then please contact us to discuss it further.