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Azure IaaS (infrastructure as a service)

Accelerate your IT transformation and innovate on your own terms

Transform your business with Azure

Start maximizing the value of your short- and long-term IT investments. By moving to Azure IaaS, you'll be able to innovate in new ways with highly secure, available, and scalable cloud services. Modernize your IT with an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure and migrate your apps with confidence.

Innovation on your terms

Run apps consistently anywhere across distributed locations. Build and deploy with a complete range of tools to meet your app development needs.

Enterprise-grade infrastructure

Optimize IT costs and efficiencies on a comprehensive cloud infrastructure that delivers choice and flexibility, increases scalability and performance as your footprint grows, and helps ensure uptime and business continuity.

Consistency across hybrid and multicloud

Get the consistency and flexibility to innovate anywhere—across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments. Bring always up-to-date Azure services to any infrastructure.

Unmatched security and compliance

Protect your workloads and networks from cybercrime by implementing a Zero Trust security model on Azure.

Build infrastructure solutions with Azure IaaS services and products

Compute

Access cloud compute capacity, virtualization, and scale on demand—and only pay for the resources you use.

Storage

Scale and secure cloud storage for your data, apps, and workloads.

Networking

Connect your cloud and on-premises infrastructure securely on a global scale.

Security

Protect your workloads and infrastructure with built-in security services and unparalleled intelligence.

Management

Simplify, automate, and optimize the management and compliance of your cloud resources.

Azure Virtual Desktop

Empower employees to work virtually anywhere. Quickly deploy a highly secure remote desktop experience.

Hybrid cloud solutions

Deliver innovation across your on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments.

High-performance computing (HPC)

Run compute-intensive workloads with maximum performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

Windows Server on Azure

Simplify IT management and gain seamless hybrid operations, unmatched security, and significant cost savings.

Linux on Azure

Conveniently run and manage your apps with your favorite Linux distribution on Azure.

SAP on the Microsoft Cloud

Bring the intelligence, security, and reliability of Azure to your SAP applications.

Azure VMware Solution

Run your VMware workloads natively on Azure and provision your environment within minutes.

See why Gartner named Microsoft a Leader

Discover why Microsoft was named a Leader and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS).

Read the blog

Customers are doing great things with Azure IaaS

"By binding our Azure and on-premises environments together through policies and tagging, we can create a consistent way to deploy and manage our systems in a disparate environment. That's really important to us because as we become leaner as an organization, we still need to effectively manage our IT footprint."

Kristina Melo, SQL Server Database Administrator, Ferguson Enterprises
Ferguson

"With Azure Monitor, if there's a failure in one region, we transfer traffic to the next region. We can see how utilized we are and react in the moment—no more waiting 10 to 15 minutes for alerts."

Cat Smith, Platform Lead—Reliability Engineering, ASOS
ASOS

"We can build whatever we need without overbuilding. By running SAP on Azure, we've cleared away any IT Infrastructure roadblocks. We can grow and scale up or down our infrastructure to support new business initiatives at a pace that we couldn't possibly have achieved before."

Shahid Khan, Senior Director—IT Infrastructure and Security, Chobani
Chobani

"We used Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to replicate a single image across 500 nodes of Azure HBv2-series VMs spread over Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United States. There's no way we would have delivered our latest project without that broad footprint."

Jeremy Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Jellyfish Pictures
Jellyfish Pictures

"Cloud migration is a major step in our digital transformation journey. It has allowed us to accelerate the delivery of new and more innovative services to our customers while further increasing the productivity of our AIA Insurance Representatives with the latest Azure cloud–native technologies."

Bao Wen Qing, Head of Infrastructure Engineering and Services, AIA Singapore
AIA

Get the latest Azure IaaS news and resources

Frequently asked questions

  • This is the most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, and operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

    Learn more about IaaS

  • A virtual machine (VM) behaves like a server—a computer within a computer that provides the user the same experience they would have on the host operating system itself. In general, VMs are sandboxed from the rest of the system, meaning that the software inside a virtual machine can’t escape or tamper with the underlying server itself. Each VM provides its own virtual hardware including CPUs, memory, hard drives, network interfaces, and other devices.

    Learn more about virtual machines

  • Azure Virtual Machines are image service instances Azure IaaS uses to deploy persistent VMs with nearly any server workload that you want. They are image service instances that provide on-demand and scalable computing resources with usage-based pricing.

    Azure Virtual Machines are optimized for general purpose or storage, memory, compute, and graphics-intensive workloads and are offered in a variety of types and sizes to meet your needs and keep your budget in check.

    Learn more about Azure Virtual Machines

  • Azure Disk Storage is high-performing, highly durable block storage designed to be used with Azure Virtual Machines. With unmatched resiliency, seamless scalability, and built-in security, Azure Disk Storage delivers the price-performance you need for your mission and business-critical applications.

    Learn more about Azure Disk Storage

  • The Azure global network is one of the largest global networks, available in more than 60 regions and consisting of more than 165,000 miles of private fiber. The Azure global network and services follows a Zero Trust approach when it comes to security and connects distributed workloads and locations across the world, enabling you to deliver your hybrid and cloud-native applications securely and efficiently, with low-latency.

    Learn more about Azure networking

  • In general, hybrid cloud computing refers to a cloud environment that combines public cloud and on-premises infrastructure, including private cloud, by allowing data and apps to be shared between them. It expands your cloud deployment options, offering greater flexibility to scale resources and take advantage of cloud tech innovations, while giving interoperability with on-prem environments.

    Get an intro to public, private, and hybrid clouds

    Discover unique hybrid capabilities with Azure that give you the flexibility to innovate anywhere in your on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments.

    Explore Azure hybrid and multicloud solutions

  • Scale your mission-critical applications on Azure, without compromising performance, and protect your most valuable data with compliance and security certifications. Tailor your cloud infrastructure to host your business-critical apps or let Azure do it for you with managed services. Run your workloads on Linux and Windows, tapping into an open platform with a vibrant ecosystem.

    Learn more about business-critical apps on Azure

  • Cloud services providers sometimes call cloud computing services a "stack", because they build on top of one another. While infrastructure as a service (IaaS) represents the most basic services in the stack, other services are often used together with IaaS, such as platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless computing.

    Learn more common cloud computing terms

  • PaaS refers to services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing apps. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without having to set up or manage the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.

    Learn more about PaaS

  • SaaS is a method for delivering software apps—on demand and typically on a subscription basis. Cloud providers offer SaaS to host and manage software apps and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the app over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.

    Learn more about SaaS

Migrate to the cloud with confidence

Optimize costs and efficiencies. Migrate your workloads to Azure IaaS with proven tools and guidance.

Try Azure for free

Get popular services free for 12 months and 25+ other services free always—plus $200 credit to use in the first 30 days.

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