IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a standardised, highly automated offering whereby compute resources, are complemented by storage and networking capabilities which are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand. Customers can self-provision this infrastructure by using a Web-based graphical user interface that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment.

In an IaaS model, a cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components traditionally present in an on-premises data centre, including servers, storage and networking hardware, as well as the virtualisation or hypervisor layer.