Like a cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, an AIP has purpose-built infrastructure resources for hosting high-end applications. The underlying infrastructure is accessed remotely over the Internet or within a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection. It is mainly used for deploying a developed application, rather than developing an application on top of an infrastructure.

Depending on application requirements, an AIP may provide services ranging from single to clustered servers, scalable storage, internetworking, monitoring and physical and logical security services. Generally, most of the computing/physical resources are entirely dedicated to an application/client that has complete control over the base operating system (OS) and installed/deployed applications. However, infrastructure also may be shared in a virtualization-enabled multitenant architecture.