The Service Part of Infrastructure-as-a-Service
There’s been an explosion in both IaaS and cloud computing activity over the last six months, with new players entering the field, and more and more companies recognizing the need for distributed storage and processing resources. It’s one thing, however, to outsource hardware and CPU cycles, and quite another to have those resources provided as part of a managed service. Both outsourcing models exist, but there are still wide gaps in understanding around what specific services are available, and where it make sense to transition from the former model to the latter.
The sheer infrastructure capacity required to support an online business today is enough to force many companies to look outside their own data centers and delivery networks. The fear there, however, is finding an option that meets specific business requirements as they relate to outsourced infrastructure assets. For an enterprise, the worry might be around security and guaranteed uptime. For a media company, it might be around knowing how to manage software issues like media encoding and user authentication on an outsourced hardware platform. In addition, different industries have different major players involved. If there’s any interfacing to be done with one of these third-party industry companies – say a telecom carrier, for example – then an outsourced infrastructure solution has to be provisioned and managed for that scenario.
The bottom line here is that infrastructure outsourcing today – and its offshoot, cloud computing – goes beyond the vision of grid computing a decade or so ago. Managed services can and often should play a key role. In fact, what we may see in the coming months is a growth in specialized IaaS offerings that cater to different industries and business needs. Gigabytes (terabytes, petabytes…), CPU cycles, and bandwidth capacity do not exist in a vacuum. Putting them to work toward a specific purpose is what IaaS offerings should do for the growing legion of web-based companies looking to offload infrastructure management as a non-core business function.
