IaaS Conversation Starters: Unlock the Potential of Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Companies that build on premises or colocated IT infrastructure often have pain points around cost, efficiency, and flexibility. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud service model that provides computing, storage, and networking resources over the internet on a subscription basis. The IaaS model takes the burden of maintaining hardware off the subscribing company’s hands and increases flexibility, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.

There are many companies that could benefit tremendously from IaaS but do not realize it yet. These companies have the option of either moving their entire infrastructure to an IaaS environment, or adopting IaaS as part of a hybrid strategy. To uncover IaaS opportunities among these prospects, ask the following questions.

Conversation Starters:

• Where are you in your hardware refresh cycle? Listen for comments like “Our hardware is approaching EOL,” “Some of our infrastructure is obsolete,” “We are due for a hardware refresh,” etc. If a company is planning a major hardware refresh, they can often save significant time and money by moving at least some of their workloads to the cloud.
• How are you managing security and compliance? Find out which regulations your prospect needs to comply with, and why. How are they currently meeting those regulations? Are they facing compliance challenges? And how much is compliance costing them? If a company manages compliance inhouse or in the public cloud, it can often be more cost effective to switch to a private cloud solution.
• Are you thinking about moving to the cloud? Find out what your prospect’s digital transformation plan is. If they are planning to move to the cloud, which cloud providers are they considering and why? If they are not planning to move to the cloud, why not?

Private Cloud vs Hyperscalers:

As more organizations start to design for portability, hybrid enablement is becoming increasingly important. Companies need the ability to move applications and data between the public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and co-located infrastructure.

A hybrid cloud model offers the affordable services of the public cloud, plus the enhanced security and control of the private cloud. This results in flexible, scalable, custom-built infrastructure, that is ideal for enterprises, medium-sized businesses, and even smaller businesses that are expecting significant growth in the near future.

If you think your prospect could benefit from hybrid infrastructure, ask them:

• Are you paying an “elasticity tax” on static workloads in a hyperscale public cloud platform? It is easy to quickly deploy applications in a public cloud, but if you are housing static workloads there, you are paying extra for scalability you don’t need. Moving static workloads to an IaaS platform can help you reduce costs and increase performance.
• Are you at risk of “migration lock?” Cloud-native products and code are not easy to port into another cloud provider’s technology. This can lead to vendor lock-in and the loss of technology flexibility. Enabling a hybrid environment with an IaaS solution can help you avoid getting locked-in to one hyperscale vendor.
• Are you optimizing your cost, performance, and geography? A hybrid environment with an IaaS solution can help optimize cost, performance, and geography. For example, if you are looking to reduce costs, you can migrate data-intensive workloads to the IaaS environment. If you want to host applications in a particular region, you can switch to one of your cloud provider’s other locations. If you want to increase performance, you can move a performance-demanding workload to a best fit cloud provider in real time.