What is cloud infrastructure?

Cloud infrastructure, also known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a term used to describe a core set of services that enable us to build, host, manage, and provide access to workloads that we wish to deploy in the Cloud.

In a traditional on-premise IT system, Infrastructure consists primarily of compute (servers or virtual machines), storage, networking, and security infrastructure. For a traditional IT system, we are responsible for building, managing, and maintaining all of these infrastructure components, which includes the capital expenditure of purchasing the IT hardware, buildings, plant equipment, and software necessary to run our workloads.

By contrast, we rent access to cloud infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure is built, managed, and maintained by the cloud provider. As customers, we simply select the component services we require, to host, manage, scale, and secure our workloads. Cloud infrastructure services consist of more than just servers, storage, and networking, they also provide tools for securing, auditing, deploying, and managing our workloads and the data that those workloads store or process.

Public cloud providers maintain many data centers globally, providing connectivity between them, this combination of premises and connectivity infrastructure enables cloud providers to create building blocks, which can be used to provide global availability, resilience, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities. Cloud providers also provision network connectivity to points of presence within key internet infrastructure, to facilitate connectivity with customers and clients.

Benefits and operational efficiencies of adopting the cloud: 

• Scalability allows you to provision computing power in minutes or even seconds – to quickly and cleanly scale out and importantly scale back in to adapt to demand (rather than, as you may have done in the past, overprovisioning your hardware capacity and licensed software to ensure that you can serve more than your highest anticipated demand).
• Automation brings business efficiencies, allowing you to provision new resources governed by flexible rules, freeing up staff to focus on new processes and services.
• Security is just as critical. While cloud vendors offer backup and disaster recovery, cloud infrastructure provides tools to monitor activity, limit access accordingly, and provide encryption.
• Reliability and resilience are key business benefits, ensuring high availability and continuity through business growth and business continuity.

Public, private, and hybrid cloud

There are two types of cloud infrastructure – public cloud and private cloud.

In the public cloud, infrastructure, and services are owned and operated by a third-party provider and shared among multiple customers, where the business has a fully isolated environment for their computing needs at a more competitive cost. Many businesses use a multi-cloud model where they work with a range of public cloud infrastructure and services vendors to ensure access to the best available services for their use case or budget.

Some organizations choose a private cloud. This involves a business building its own physical or on-premise infrastructure, which could be managed by the organization itself or by a managed service provider, but in either case, it is for the exclusive use of the organization. Private cloud may be necessary, where applications need to be physically close to equipment, or where compliance rules require data to be stored and handled under strict conditions, to which a public cloud provider may not be thought suited.

When factoring in the cost of physical infrastructure, private cloud is usually less flexible and more expensive for the same output, as the customer is generally required to over-provision to provide a capacity vastly higher than the average usage, to accommodate for failures, disaster scenarios, as well as peak usage.

Hybrid cloud is a strategy of using both public and private cloud, choosing to use private cloud only where necessary, while utilizing public cloud elsewhere, for requirements such as backup, disaster recovery, additional capacity on-demand, and often as a place from which to deliver the majority of business applications. Many organizations indicate a preference to use public cloud as a first choice, whenever possible, this is often described as a ‘cloud first’ strategy.