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Figure 3: Cloud‐Services‐Model (EuroCloud)
The business scenario defines the type of Cloud computing to be used within
the scope of a holistic strategy. As a general rule: The lower down in the
levels of this model, the greater the degree of standardisation is, and the
more universal the use cases are. The higher the level, the more customised
the environment to customer requirements.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
The customer can rent the IT infrastructure such as space, air‐conditioning,
network, servers through to the operating system along with corresponding
operational monitoring on a subscription basis. They can then freely
implement their application environments on this infrastructure. You could
also view IaaS as a virtualised datacentre resource. Virtualisation
technologies and large available network bandwidths lay the foundations for
the Cloud as the most important underlying resources. Provisioning and
automation of standardized services form the basis for the commercial
appeal of this model.
Examples of IaaS are Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS) or IBM’s
"
Smart Enterprise Cloud", that is, IaaS with the option of concluding Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure availability.
