An IaaS PoC, or Infrastructure as a Service Proof of Concept, is a controlled test to validate a cloud provider’s capabilities against your technical and business requirements. It is not theory. It is a live environment running your workloads, built to expose limits and confirm fit.
The scope should be small, but the design must be exact. Start with critical workloads and services. Focus on compute performance, network latency, and scaling behavior. Measure how the provider handles peak load. Benchmark storage throughput. Track cost under realistic traffic. Every metric must be tied to a success criterion defined before launch.
Security cannot be deferred. In the PoC, enforce authentication, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and compliance checks. If the security model fails here, it will fail in production.