Cloud and Infrastructure

Cloud and IaaS

Cloud infrastructure, or IaaS, is renting servers, storage and networking from a provider instead of buying and running the hardware yourself. You can run it on one of the big public platforms, in a provider's private environment, or as a blend of both alongside the servers you still keep.

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Coverage

Buyer's checklist

Eight questions that decide this purchase

Think these through before you buy. Answer what you can and your quote comes back faster. Skip what you cannot, and we will work through it with you.

01
What is each environment for: production, test and development, or backup and recovery? Each one deserves a different balance of cost and resilience.
02
How many servers, and how much memory and storage, have you provisioned, and how much of it do you actually use?
03
Which operating systems are you running, and are any past end of support?
04
Which platform do your applications and databases need: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, a VMware-based private cloud, or dedicated bare metal servers?
05
Will you move workloads as they are, or right-size them during the move?
06
Who runs the environment afterward, and to what level: alerts only, or hands-on engineering?
07
Which standards apply, such as HIPAA, PCI or SOC 2, and in which regions must the data stay?
08
Do you want to pay as you go, commit for a longer term, or mix the two, and who will watch the bill each month?

More on what it is

A few terms will come up right away. IaaS stands for infrastructure as a service. A hyperscaler is one of the very large public platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. A private cloud is capacity set aside for you in a provider's data center. Hybrid cloud means some workloads stay on your premises, others run with a provider, and the two are connected and operated as one environment. Most companies end up hybrid, because they move gradually.

Some things change when you rent. A new server is ready in minutes instead of weeks, and the spending moves from a large purchase every few years to an ongoing operating cost. Other things stay the same. Someone still has to design the environment, secure it, patch it, watch it and keep the bill under control. Providers sell that work in tiers, from basic alert monitoring up to architect-level engineering, and the tier you choose matters as much as the platform.

The move itself is a project. Migration tools can discover your existing servers, measure how hard they really work, and move them. You can move each server as it is, which is faster, or right-size it on the way, which means matching what you rent to what you actually use. The gap between what you have provisioned and what you use is where wasted spending hides, and moving as-is carries that waste with you.

Cost control is not a one-time cleanup. Usage drifts upward unless someone watches it every month. The discipline has a name, FinOps.

Two special cases are worth knowing. Older IBM i and AIX systems can sit right next to public cloud capacity, so new workloads run alongside them with no rewrite. And if your team runs VMware today, a hosted VMware environment lets them keep the same tools. That has its own page, Private Cloud and VMware.

Who needs it

You are a small or midsize company moving core applications and databases off servers in your own building, probably a few at a time.
You are growing fast or acquiring companies, and the environment has to expand faster than your team can build it.
You are a software vendor that stands up a similar environment for each client and has to meet a compliance standard to do it.
A hardware refresh is coming and finance would prefer an operating expense to a capital purchase.
You need cloud engineering skills and cannot justify a full-time hire.

If your servers are recent and nothing is pushing you to grow, no deadline is forcing a move. Measure what you actually use first. That number decides whether the cloud saves you anything.

Signs you need it

Servers are running an operating system its maker no longer supports.
Nobody can say how heavily the current servers are used, which makes sizing anything new a guess.
The environment no longer meets the uptime the business expects.
Your cloud bill rises every quarter and no one owns it.
Each platform has its own security rules, and nobody can describe the policy as a whole.

How IT Raven helps

Add Cloud and IaaS to your quote list and tell us what you run today and why you are looking. A person takes that to the cloud and managed hosting providers in our 500+ partner network and sorts them on the things that narrow the field: the platform your applications need, the standards and regions you are bound to, and how much of the day-to-day work you want to hand over.

We will push you to size it honestly first. If you do not have usage numbers for your current servers, getting them is step one, and several providers will run that assessment as part of the engagement.

Cloud rarely travels alone. A hybrid environment needs one security policy across every platform, which leads to Managed Security. Hosted infrastructure needs a tested way back, which is Backup and Disaster Recovery. Hardware you intend to keep belongs in Colocation. We quote them together and stay on one thread through the assessment, the migration plan and the cutover. The same team is here when the bill needs a second look.

Eight questions that decide this purchase

127 companies to compare

No company matches every box you checked

More on what it is

Who needs it

Signs you need it

How IT Raven helps

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