Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that delivers on-demand IT infrastructure resources such as servers, virtual machines (VMs), compute, network and storage to consumers over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

You can use IaaS to scale your compute capacity while reducing your IT expenditure. Traditionally, enterprises purchased and maintained their own computing devices in an on-premises data center. However, this often required a heavy up-front investment to handle only occasionally high workloads.