IaaS – background

Across the industry, hardware has been largely ignored for a very long time. Servers were not sexy. There was no glory for servers. Servers were just a support for the more important applications. Applications got all the credit for solving business challenges. Applications were the things that users interacted with directly. Servers got stuck in dark closets, forgotten and neglected until a problem occurred.

Because servers received no glory, very little to no maintenance and no budget for patching, upgrading, and so on, many servers are now well beyond their service life and prone to failure. Incredible amounts of money will be spent over the next several years rewriting applications, developing new applications, migrating legacy applications, and updating to new cloud-ready functions needed to replace old applications and neglected hardware currently stuck in old closets and worn out in-house data centers.

IaaS gave many the opportunity to upgrade, refresh infrastructure, and move from excessive capital spending to a monthly pay-as-you-go incremental spend. The shift enables strategy changes, go-to-market changes, differences in software development, and changes in handling IT workloads. Think of what hundreds of servers can do in one hour versus one server for hundreds of hours.