The acronym “IaaS” is used for both “Infrastructure as a Service” that provides on-demand scalable technology and infrastructure and “for Information as a Service” that is discussed in this article.
Competition is progressively increasing in almost every market and information is becoming one of the most valuable business assets and for today’s businesses to function efficiently, information systems need to have access to correct data in real-time.
Conventionally, efficient and correct real-time data access is problematic due to:
- Use of many heterogeneous data formats
- High application integration costs
- Extensive processing times
This is slowing-down or even preventing a free flow of accurate, timely information between different systems.
Information as a Service (IaaS) aims to provide businesses with simplified, cohesive, real-time, quality information about the business entity, customers, products etc. as “Information on-demand”.
Core ideas of IaaS services are built around the concept of ‘Data Visualization’.
‘Data Virtualization’ allows merging data that reside within many systems and repositories across a whole enterprise and creates a unified, logical virtualized data layer to create optimized front-end business solution including portals, reports, applications and more.
The concepts of ‘Shared Infrastructure’ and ‘Virtual Data Management’ include the automatic and dynamic segregating of electronic information in different memory across multiple servers providing continuous data availability and transactional integrity. It allows performing real-time data analysis, parallel transactions, in-memory grid computations and fast event processing.
Finally, the principle of ‘Virtual Runtime Management’ safeguards that the right work gets done at the correct time with the accurate resources in agreement with the individual businesses policies and regulations.
IaaS aims to:
- Reduce operational problems due to heterogeneous data sources
- Simplify real-time data sharing between different enterprise systems (e.g. ERP and CRM systems, business intelligence tools, mash-ups, and portals)
- Save costs and time and to reduce stress
- Improve query performance
- Permit enterprise-scale operations
- Mask data that adds element-level protection to virtual data sources
- Improve third-party integrations to build better enterprise platforms
- Integrate “Big Data” for business awareness
- stablish and maintain one trusted source of data for specific work flows to unify systems and users
In summary IaaS means delivering business intelligence to a wide variety of applications and users as needed, increasing the information flow in any company and providing effective management and evaluation of enterprise data that is becoming a critical factor in setting a business apart from other competitors.
