Businesses are adopting cloud services, trying to move up in the market and stay at par with the competition. IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, is one of the many services brought on by cloud computing. IaaS is quite self-explanatory. IaaS is a form of cloud computing where a vendor manages infrastructure requirements such as server, storage, and networking resources. This infrastructure is then provided to businesses using virtual machines that can be accessed via the internet. Organizations utilizing IaaS solutions need not worry about supporting or upgrading their infrastructure either as it will be taken care of by the IaaS vendor.
Other than the relieving businesses of infrastructure administration, IaaS does come up with other benefits such as:
On the Other Hand
While IaaS seems like the most reliable and efficient option owing to the many business advantages, there are a few hiccups too. Nevertheless, with careful planning and consideration, these faults can be fixed and businesses can continue enjoying the benefits of IaaS.
Vendor Lock-in
While migrating to the cloud, businesses often avail services from just one cloud vendor. This makes them entirely dependent on a single cloud vendor for all their business requirements. As they say, it is unwise to place all your eggs in one basket.
Likewise, it is unwise to use a single IaaS vendor.
Organizations utilizing cloud hosting and web hosting services from just one vendor may face troubles when the vendor themselves are going through rough patches. When businesses are entirely dependent on a single cloud vendor, it is called vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in is calamitous to businesses.
- The vendor’s service offering quality could drop or they could go out of business
- The vendor could increase the pricing of the offerings knowing that their customers are locked in.
- The vendor could change their service offerings which would not align with the customer’s business requirements.
- Flexibility in terms of introducing new offerings that need infrastructural changes can often result in misconfiguration.
Service Outages
Regardless of which IaaS vendor businesses are utilizing, vendor outages are an inevitable drawback. In the last year (2021) alone, there have been over 10 cloud outages. Few of them were from AWS, Azure, and even Google Cloud. Even with cutting-edge technologies and disaster recovery strategies, Meta too suffered a 6-hour stand-still due to “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers”.
- IaaS outages affect business continuity, compromises security, privacy, etc. of the vendor and subsequently the customers.
Cloud Engineering Services to Stay Ahead of The Game
This just goes on to show that nothing is perfect. Even though IaaS does offer businesses the phenomenal advantages of cloud computing, it does come with its own challenges. However, customers can prepare themselves for such events and stay a step ahead.
Cloud Agnostic Architecture
Organizations or applications need not be dependent on any single cloud vendor. They must spread their business workflows across cloud computing services from different vendors. This means businesses can shift workloads seamlessly between cloud vendors and regions in the event of an outage, ensuring a fool-proof disaster recovery.
Mutli-cloud / Hybrid cloud Strategy
Just as it is detrimental to utilize a single vendor, it is also not wise to depend on a single cloud solution. Organizations must spread workloads across multiple locations, cloud solutions (SaaS, PaaS), and cloud providers to ensure redundancy, resiliency, and reduce the risk of downtime.
Monitor Internet Traffic Patterns
Cloud solutions such as IaaS need to be accessed through the internet. It would do well for organizations to keep an eye out and monitor the global internet for outages, security problems, and latency. This way businesses can be prepared for any outages coming their way before it happens. After all, precaution is better than cure.
Cloud Engineering Experts at Your Behest
With the right partner, programming workflows with IaaS cloud engineering solutions to keep enterprise solutions up and running is a piece of cake.
Connect with cloud solutions experts at Nalashaa at info@nalashaa.com and make your mark in the market with cutting-edge cloud engineering solutions.
