What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. In an IaaS model, a cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components traditionally present in an on-premises data center, including servers, storage, and networking hardware, as well as the virtualization or hypervisor layer.

The IaaS provider also offers a range of services alongside those infrastructure components, such as detailed billing, monitoring, log access, security, load balancing, and clustering. These services can offer the customer greater scalability and flexibility over their infrastructure, often with a pay-as-you-go model that can lead to cost savings compared to managing physical infrastructure.

IaaS users can still access their servers and storage directly, but it is all outsourced through a “virtual data center” in the cloud. As a result, IaaS is well-suited for a variety of workloads that are temporary, experimental, or change unexpectedly. Common use cases include hosting websites, supporting web apps, storage, backup, and recovery, hosting high-performance computing applications, and supporting big data analysis.

Secureframe's GRC automation platform offers integrations with well-known IaaS providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).