OVERVIEW

IT infrastructure represents significant cost and effort for many enterprises. What most enterprises want is to focus on their core business and not get into the "racking and stacking" business i.e. purchase, provision, maintain, upgrade a host of IT infrastructure components such as servers, storage, databases, networks etc. 

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)  is a relatively new phenomenon and represents a significant innovation in terms of extending the service model to the entire infrastructure stack, from facilities to compute to operating systems to storage and to the networks. 

Private clouds take this abstraction model to the next level by providing self-service capabilities and APIs that allow logical access to these resources.