IaaS vs. PaaS: Cloud IT and Your Business

Do you know your SaaS from your PaaS, and your IaaS from your NaaS? If you’re moving your business to the cloud, or planning a new cloud-based platform, it’s important to understand which is which, so you can choose the right deployment for your business. In this blog, we’ll discuss IaaS vs. PaaS – infrastructure as a service and platform as a service – explaining the benefits of each option and the challenges they could solve for your organisation.

But first, let’s quickly remind ourselves of why you might move your business to the cloud in the first place.

Technology for growth: the benefits of business in the cloud

The cloud is one of the great business equalisers. The benefits exist for organisations of any size and across any industry. Whether you choose to deploy IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or any other ‘as a service’ model, you are putting in place an extremely valuable business growth enabler.

When you run your business workloads from the cloud, it means that you no longer have to own, manage or maintain the computing power that drives your organisation. This transforms how work is done and the costs of running your company. The cloud empowers your business and sets you up for long-term growth. Some of the key benefits include:

• Reducing IT costs
• Increasing productivity
• Strengthening cybersecurity
• Enabling flexible/remote working
• Speeding up processes
• Improving the customer experience

Many businesses believe that their current IT set up works well for them. So, why change? If it isn’t broken, why fix it, right? However, as more and more businesses move to the cloud and take advantage of the benefits listed above, those that choose to stay on-premises risk falling behind their competitors.

Let’s look at both IaaS and PaaS and why they might be essential to your business today.

IaaS vs. PaaS

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to host all your IT infrastructure in the cloud. The term ‘infrastructure’ includes everything that powers your IT environment and delivers all the things users need, including storage, hosting, network, and more. Before the cloud, all of this would have been run on a physical server in the office, requiring significant IT resource to manage and maintain.

With IaaS, your IT staff are freed up to work on tasks of much higher value. There are large cost savings to be made, while also enabling your current IT resources to go much further. Alongside this, IaaS is also more secure and reliable, with seasoned experts managing the 1s and 0s under the hood of your infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure IaaS benefits

The reason many choose Microsoft Azure is down to its ease of migration, security and reliability. Migrating to Microsoft Azure IaaS is quick, easy and causes little to no disruption to your business. Benefits include:

• Empowering remote productivity for users
• World class virtual desktop experience
• Efficient unified security and management capabilities
• Cost savings moving from CAPEX to OPEX
• Increased value from existing investments

PaaS

Platform as a Service (PaaS) gives your business the tools, infrastructure, and support to build and run cloud-based applications, accelerate processes and reduce costs. Mobile apps play a huge role in how customers and companies interact. Today, customers expect companies to have mobile apps – it’s a key customer experience differentiator. Along with satisfying customer expectations, mobile apps can help your business:

• Understand the customer journey
• Become more customer-focused
• Collect data to improve decision-making
• Enhance your marketing strategy

Of course, many organisations may not be thinking of creating their own app yet, but it is increasingly becoming key to overall business improvements and growth. From building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating your app, PaaS has what you need, without a large capital investment in IT.

Many organisations choose Microsoft Azure for PaaS due to its fast setup speeds, ability to scale resource in real time, reduced deployment risk, and lack of manual updates and reboots – which will sound like heaven to your systems administrators.

Those are just some of the benefits of choosing PaaS with Microsoft Azure. Here are some more:

• Significantly reduced coding time
• Increased development capabilities without adding staff
• Multiple platform development
• A big step to developing a mobile-first mindset
• Affordable and sophisticated tools
• Efficiently manage the application life cycle

Build your business in the cloud with Talk Think Do

The first step on your cloud journey is figuring out what cloud service is best for you. For a lot of businesses, scaling their IT environment in Microsoft Azure offers the best of IaaS and PaaS, as well as SaaS (software as a service). With Azure, you can harness the power of these fundamental cloud computing options to truly transform your business.

In this article, we wanted to give you a snapshot of these different cloud options. The next key step is understanding what your business needs to be a success. The flexibility of cloud computing, and Microsoft Azure in particular, means your business goals are more achievable today than ever.

At Talk Think Do, we are experts in understanding what our clients need from their IT investments. We don’t sell solutions for the sake of it. Instead we partner with you to solve your obstacles via the right technology. We want to put in place an infrastructure that allows you to achieve goals and grow in the long term. So, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Whether you want to discuss IaaS vs. PaaS further or other technology essential to digital transformation, Talk Think Do can help you make the right choice for your organisation.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business get the most from IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, start a conversation with us today.