Organizational and Methodological Issues of Using Infrastructure as a Service

The subject of research in this paper is Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a technology for virtualization of information infrastructure of business organizations. The study focuses on the organizational and methodological issues of implementing IaaS as a new approach to providing scalable virtualized resources that maintain flexibility and increase the efficiency of information infrastructure across organizations. The purpose of the research is to study the nature, importance and benefits of IaaS to identify the problems in their use by different organizations and to propose a methodology for selecting cloud infrastructure providers suitable for the Bulgarian business environment. To accomplish this goal, the following research tasks have been solved: 1. The nature and the component composition of the corporate information infrastructure have been studied and as a result a working definition for the information infrastructure has been drawn up. 2. The components of the corporate IT infrastructure are defined. 3. The main organizational and methodological problems related to the use of private and public clouds providing IaaS have been identified and systematized and recommendations for their solution have been defined. 4. Possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of IaaS solutions of leading global and native cloud service providers are analyzed. 5. A practical study was conducted on the use of IaaS by Bulgarian business organizations. 6. A methodology for selecting IaaS providers has been created. Based on the research done and the application of a number of approaches, methods and analyzes, the following scientific and applied scientific contributions have been made: 1. The essence of the concepts of information infrastructure, corporate information infrastructure, virtualization, server virtualization, cloud computing, private and public cloud deployment model is clarified. 2. An analysis of global and Bulgarian IaaS vendor solutions was made, which confirmed the overall view of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) advantage over other global IaaS vendors. With regard to Bulgarian IaaS providers, a specific provider cannot be identified due to the different advantages and disadvantages of each. 3. Based on a survey with practitioners, an analysis was carried out to determine the current state of the corporate information infrastructure and the use of IaaS by business organizations in Bulgaria. 4. A methodology for selecting an IaaS provider developed by Bulgarian business organizations has been developed. This monograph is based on a dissertation thesis, defended on 29.09.2017 at the D. A. Tsenov Academy of Economics at a meeting of the Scientific Jury.