Module two, levels of managed service. Lesson one, infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure as a service resembles a typical outsourcing model. Quite often, infrastructure requires highly trained individuals and several individuals. So it can be expensive and also labor-intensive. Infrastructure as a service offerings would include such items as virtual servers, virtual desktop, security, networking, storage. IT infrastructure involves efforts that require typically large investments to deploy, maintain, and upgrade. Therefore, infrastructure as a service makes it possible for firms of any size to have the same level of infrastructure support and infrastructure resources as any large firm. Common infrastructure as a service use cases, development and test environments. Quite often, software quality is linked to the environment that the software application runs. Infrastructure as a service makes it possible to have many servers implemented that are all identical. This way development and testing can take place in an environment that's identical to the live production environment where the application will run. This greatly enhances quality. Infrastructure as a service provides a true single environment for all development and tests. Development and testing in an environment that emulates production is the best scenario for quality. And IaaS approaches virtualization in a way that we can maintain consistency. With virtualization it is possible to manage hardware desktops and hardware servers just like software is managed. Meaning that if a new copy is needed, a new copy can be created very quickly. Therefore an environment can be templated and copied as many times as needed. So what this is saying here is a single computer or computer image can be templated. That's almost like creating a file or creating new files using copy/paste from Windows Explorer. A template can be copied and then pasted as many times as needed. However, though it will act as a standalone computer. It'll have its own host name and its own network address. Application hosting is another service provided by infrastructure as a service and the virtual servers that are part of a cloud computing offering actually host the application. Infrastructure as a service offers runtime servers that can be deployed and scaled up as needed. These can be customer-facing runtime servers or they could be for back office processing or a number of different use cases where these services would be needed. Application hosting can be native, web, or for mobile applications. This same approach can be used for storage and backup. So if data needs to be backed up to a secure off-site facility, infrastructure as a service is nearly a perfect type of offering for that need. Infrastructure as a service delivers the environments, the disk space, the memory to enable data backup and recovery. And resources for data backup and recovery can be deployed as needed. So some of the business advantages with infrastructure as a service. Industry best practices for business continuity. So therefore backups can be made to the cloud provider and restoration can quickly be done by the cloud provider. Respond sooner to changes in business conditions. So if a new development environment or possibly a new security school can make a big difference in the value being delivered. Infrastructure as a service quite often is the quickest to respond to that need. Customers can keep their resources focused on their core business. So there is no need to dedicate investment or any other type of time and resources to IT infrastructure. It all can be outsourced to the cloud provider. The cloud provider can also offer expert technical staffing and or consulting only when needed. And infrastructure to service offers a faster time to market with applications and other information assets. With the same approach that we just discussed, many identical environments can be implemented and once an application reaches a point where a user can just begin to get value from it. It can be readily deployed to one of these operating environments or execution environments or maybe sometimes a runtime environment that is offered by infrastructure as a service. And some examples of providers for infrastructure as a service include Amazon Web Services or AWS, Microsoft Azure, or the Google Cloud.
