Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model providing on-demand, virtualized IT infrastructure—servers, storage, and networking—over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Relevance of This Topic in 2026

  • Worldwide sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) spending is expected to increase by 36% to $80 billion in 2026 due to growing global interest in keeping data, technology and digital value within national borders.
  • Simply explained provide consumers with the basic building blocks that are needed to run applications and workloads in the cloud.

Advantage

  • It allows businesses to avoid purchasing, maintaining, and managing physical hardware, offering high scalability, flexibility, and reduced capital expenditures.
  • On-demand access to virtual machines will help in ensuring flexibility in services.
  • Resources can be scaled up or down instantly based on demand. This is through virtualisation technology.

Components

  • IaaS compute includes central processing units (CPU) inside servers for processing web requests and running applications.
  • Graphical processing units (GPU) that handle high-performance workloads.
  • Internal memory (RAM).

Service Providers (Important)

  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Cloud
  • IBM
  • Amazon Web Services

What are virtual servers?

  • • Virtual servers are software-based servers that allow multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run simultaneously on a single “bare metal” physical server.

Source: The Indian Express