Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allows a third-party to house the equipment that includes storage, servers and other networking elements, outsourcing completely all the issues related to infrastructure management. The third-party owns the equipment and has responsibility of maintaining and housing it, while ensuring full functionality.

Main characteristic that makes IaaS useful is dynamic scaling, as an IaaS user you are free from traditional constrains of capacity planning - hardware making it easier and faster  to deploy needed infrastructure and cutting costs by eliminating payment for non used resources.

IaaS comes in different types, such as Public and Hybrid Cloud and are supplied by different providers. You can find more information on IaaS types here and we have also short IaaS providers comparison page, both being constantly updated.