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Feb 26
2010
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Business is cost conscious and the opportunity to cut costs wherever possible, is high on the mind of the CFO and the CIO. Indeed coemptive pressure are such that saving money may well be a matter of survival. IT functions based on in-house infrastructure are high on the list of areas that are being outsourced. This applies across the scale from single applications to entire data centres.
Adoption of various forms of IT out-tasking has risen dramatically over recent years on the back of the notion that in tough economic times the last thing you need to be doing is building out your own facilities. Such long-term investment in those facilities, represents capital expenses that are fixed. The capex is inescapable. In a highly coemptive marketplace, companies want the greatest liquidity and as much flexibility as possible.
The data centre requires highly specialised specialized expertise to operate and, given that servers are the lifeblood of the corporation, efficiency is a pre requisite, thus placing a lot of pressure on the company to have appropriate staffing. – a high operational cost added to a fixed capex cost..
Hence Managed s can present an attractive alternative for many customers. In Managed Hosting, it is an external, a third party service provider who owns and manages the server dedicated to your company. The server r infrastructure is located in its own data centre. In an outsourced environment, a customer loads the applications they require on the Managed Hosting providers' servers and accesses them via a high-speed broadband connection.
In the vast majority of cases and with the expectation of a unique set of proprietary needs, using an outsourced third party Managed Hosting provider who has greater skills, greater scalability and economies of scale. It offers the customer greater flexibility and a significant freeing up of resources; a factor which attractive to any company - whether small, medium or large.
Factors in assessing Managed providers
None of the benefits of managed histing will be delivered if reliability is not at the highest level. Mission critical data is paramount to a company. Reliability comes with experience and expertise and an infrastructure that can effectively deliver the service. The change in assessing the various Managed Hosting providers in order to decide which will offer the best level of service can be a complex exercise examining in detail the service providers server technology, their network capabilities and the facilities in place for disaster recovery.