In today’s challenging economic and competitive environment, organizations are faced with tightening budgets and reduced resources. They are looking for creative and effective ways to get the greatest return on investment, while achieving or sustaining business growth and profitability. This delicate balance especially affects one business function in any enterprise—corporate IT services.

While IT capabilities are arguably the lifeline of most companies, IT departments are also under increasing pressure to achieve more with reduced capital and constrained operating budgets for infrastructure facilities, technology acquisition and refresh, and staffing. Adding to the challenge of sustaining operations with tighter budgets is the fact that It departments are being asked simultaneously to support more services and more users—with the expectation of higher performance and, in some instances, with formal internal slas accompanying internal It charge-backs to the lines of business.

In the face of these financial and operating challenges, businesses are moving away from the traditional model of building and maintaining their own internal IT infrastructure to an outsourced, services-oriented business arrangement. This external services-based approach to delivering It services is now becoming recognized in the industry as Infrastructure-as-a-service, or Iaas. The basic concepts of Iaas have been around since the late 1990s, with its elements evolving since that time as either a web hosting service or asP (application service Provider) service now known as saas (software as a service). What distinguishes Iaas service from these older variants is the more comprehensive approach that service providers are taking to deliver support for all major aspects of a corporate IT infrastructure, via a hosted service model.