Around 2010, with the advent of digital and mobile services, a global insurance firm was looking to expand its digital footprint in response to the issues faced at that time – rising customer expectations, an increasingly mobile workforce, and the need to integrate and scale its IT operations globally. Each regional office of the company maintained and managed its own infrastructure with onsite teams, resulting in slow and expensive upgrades. This is where Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS came to their rescue. With the IaaS model, the company is now responding to its global requirements through a vast, cloud-based network that provides compute power, storage, and security tools on demand. The result – a faster, leaner, and more efficient organisation.
What started out in the beginning as a practice of mainly renting servers, an easier, cheaper alternative to running on-site infrastructure today includes a full suite of services – computing power, storage, networking, and security – all available on demand and accessible from almost anywhere. In this blog, we explore key questions that explain – what is IaaS, how it has evolved, why it is integral to the cloud landscape, what are the risks involved, and what does the future look like.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the most fundamental form of cloud computing services offered by a cloud service provider. It provides essential IT resources – servers, storage, networking, and virtualisation – over the internet. Companies can outsource their computing infrastructure, while retaining full control over their applications, data, and configurations. This on-demand model enables companies to scale up or down according to their needs, only paying for what they use. Very simply put, it enables companies to rent the backbone of IT infrastructure from a provider, and not invest in building and maintaining it in-house.
IaaS is not one single service, but a combination of integrated services, each critical to modern IT environments. At Intelics Cloud, our approach to IaaS rests on three key components: high performing computing power, comprehensive storage solutions, and robust network and security services, all designed to deliver performance, reliability, and control to meet the evolving needs of modern businesses.
Compute as a Service
Compute services include the infrastructure and resources that enable users to process data and run applications. At its core, compute as a service delivers processing power, through a combination of the virtual and physical that include virtual machines (VMs), containers, and even bare-metal servers. When using Compute as a Service, companies no longer need to maintain physical servers. Instead, they can provision a VM with the required CPU, memory, and OS – all on demand and in minutes.
At Intelics Cloud, we offer our clients the flexibility to rapidly deploy high-performance VMs, fully customised to suit individual requirements. CPU and RAM configurations can be precisely tailored to meet specific needs, allowing businesses to optimise their cloud infrastructure for both performance and cost-efficiency.
Storage as a Service
Data is often described as the new oil. With storage as a service, protecting this valuable asset becomes easier. Companies can access storage resources on the cloud, thereby offering scalability, easy accessibility, flexibility, and security. Most importantly, this storage is geography agnostic, ensuring business continuity and compliance aligned to data sovereignty laws.
With Intelics Cloud, clients can avail a comprehensive range of storage solutions including block storage, object storage, and high-performance IOPS storage – alongside Snapshots and backup services for robust and resilient data management.
Network and Security Services
Typically, networking tools include virtual networks, load balancers, VPN gateways, and many more. There are also some critical security features such as firewalls, identity management, intrusion detection, encryption, and DDoS protection that form the digital perimeter of a company’s cloud presence. With increasing and ever evolving cyber threats, these security features help users maintain compliance, safeguard sensitive data, and ensure uninterrupted connectivity. In addition, integrating advanced security protocols and real-time monitoring enable organisations to seamlessly run mission-critical workloads in the cloud without threatening performance or protection.
Intelics Cloud offers a secure and isolated cloud environment for computing and storage needs, enabling tailored management of compute resources, storage volumes and types, network configurations, and governance controls.
Together, compute, storage, and networking form the essential foundation of any IaaS solution. Its like renting a high-performance, scalable IT backbone, without the investments or the worry about hardware.
The push towards digital transformation is inextricably linked with IaaS to enable growth, flexibility, and resilience in a cost-effective manner. IaaS enables companies to enjoy several benefits:
While IaaS is a transformative model, there are some challenges. The most concerning one is vendor lock-in. Once a specific provider builds systems within their environment, switching can be complex and expensive. Managing cloud sprawl, security misconfigurations, and cost overruns can also pose challenges, particularly for companies without mature IT governance. At Intelics Cloud, we offer true flexibility, with no vendor lock-in or high exit costs – empowering our clients to scale at their own pace, free from restrictive commitments.
Security is a key feature of IaaS, but it operates under a shared responsibility model. While service providers secure the infrastructure, companies need to secure their applications, identities, and data. To navigate these risks, many companies turn to multi-cloud strategies -using different IaaS providers for different workloads, or hybrid models that combine on-premise and cloud resources.
IaaS is revolutionising cloud computing by navigating digital transformation while enabling businesses to innovate faster and scale with ease. The need for scalable, cost efficient, and flexible IT infrastructure will continue to drive the demand for IaaS. The IaaS market is expanding rapidly across the globe, growing from nearly $157 billion in 2024 to over $190 billion in 2025, and is projected to surpass $712 billion by 2032, driven by a CAGR of 21%. 1
AI-driven automation, serverless computing, and edge computing are some of the major trends that are driving the future. There is also a clear shift towards sustainable and efficient energy solutions.