Implementing Infrastructure as a Service? Here’s What You Need to Consider

Agility, flexibility, and scalability are market differentiators for today’s enterprise leaders, yet few have the time or expertise to determine the best infrastructures to support their companies in these aspects. Adding to this challenge is the pressing IT skills gap, causing a shortage of qualified, skilled IT personnel, including technicians. In response, many business executives are turning to infrastructure as a service (IaaS). They want to ensure their setups enable them to innovate not only to keep pace with but also thrive in their competitive markets.

What Is IaaS?

IaaS users outsource their companies’ traditional on-premise infrastructures to service providers. This setup typically includes up-to-date outsourced hardware, software, servers, storage, and networking components. These service providers also offer a range of infrastructure support services, including 24/7 help desks staffed with experts who can respond to and resolve technical issues, server monitoring and maintenance; data backup and network security, as well as disaster recovery plan and data backup preparation and implementation. IaaS providers take technical responsibilities off their clients’ shoulders by investigating, diagnosing, and solving computer hardware and software problems.

IaaS benefits

IaaS setups offer many benefits. Without the need for large upfront capital expenses and with pay-as-you-use policies, IaaS solutions are cost-effective options for many business decision-makers. Scalability is another advantage: Users can quickly scale their infrastructures up when business spikes or innovative opportunities present themselves — or scale down and pay less when they need fewer services. Finally, IaaS enables business professionals to focus on daily tasks and long-term company goals. According to a StateTech article, “Time, money and energy spent making technology decisions and hiring staff to manage and maintain the technology infrastructure is time not spent on growing the business. By moving infrastructure to a service-based model, organizations can focus their time and resources where they belong, on developing innovations in applications and solutions.”

Infrastructure considerations

Once you’ve decided to delve into an IaaS implementation, first consider what the right infrastructure setup is for you and your business. In addition to reviewing costs, setting service level agreements (SLAs), and the like, discuss the following considerations with your service provider.

• Security — How will the service provider secure your company data? Where will the provider encrypt data? and How can the provider help you ensure compliance? And what will the breach notification process involve?
• Storage — What kinds of storage does the provider offer? Does the provider guarantee storage performance? Is shared storage an option?
• Disaster recovery — How will the service provider handle failover? Does the provider include site-level high-availability? What design options should you consider to best enable disaster recovery?
• Compute — Are virtual machines (VMs) the only option, or does the provider offer physical servers? What central processing unit (CPU), memory, failover, storage, network card, and other options does the provider make available on a compute level?
• Server setup — What are the memory and speed types available for servers? Can you choose memory size and opt for multicore CPUs? Do the servers have redundant power supplies?
• Network — What throughput options are available for various components, including between VMs in the same data center, VMs across different data centers, to and from the internet, and between VMs and storage?
• Manageability — What can you control and how will you manage IaaS implementation components such as applications, utilities and tools as well as SLAs?

Find the right infrastructure services provider

With the right IaaS provider, executives can help their companies compete, innovate, and excel. The wrong provider can cost you and your employees time, energy, and, of course, money. To avoid provider pitfalls, consider the following when choosing an infrastructure services provider.

• Coverage and reliability — It’s important your chosen provider has reliable contractors available 24/7. Will they show up? Do they take pride in their work? Do they take emergency calls? It’s crucial companies in rural areas get the coverage they need as well.
• Communication — Like all good relationships, communication is key. Service providers should never leave clients in the dark and should always respond and deal with concerns quickly. Have you clearly communicated these terms of your agreement as well?
• Knowledgeable technicians — Company leaders need to get things done without having to pay for training or working around downtime. Reliable, dependable, skilled technicians who can go anywhere to service customers are crucial. Can you ensure your service provider’s techs aren’t segregated and that they have diverse skill sets?
• Adaptability — Enterprise decision-makers want things done in particular ways for their businesses, so infrastructure services providers should be able to offer extreme focus on details. There is no one-size-fits-all approach: Find a provider who is also a partner.

With the many advantages IaaS implementations offer, smart company leaders are overcoming the skills gap. IaaS is aiding them in their abilities to innovate and allowing them to overshadow the competition. If you’re considering an IaaS implementation, take the time to find the right provider who will work with you to create a custom solution that offers reliable, ongoing benefits to you and your company.

At Firmament Solutions, our structured portfolio ranges from network circuits to security monitoring. We can help lessen your overall costs and simplify your infrastructure, letting you get back to the business of running your business — instead of servicing your hardware.

We would like to be your single integrated infrastructure services provider. For more information about our business and how our experts can consolidate your Rolodex as well as free up your valuable IT resources, message us on LinkedIn or visit us online.