Building and maintaining modern data centers can be a very expensive proposition, best left to the experts. For many years, data center management companies delivered co-location and managed hosting services for their customers that wanted to take advantage of access to world class data centers without having to build their own. Now that public cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is a well-established $13 billion industry, companies increasingly are looking at IaaS as a more cost effective and flexible alternative.
For companies that still need control and privacy but do not have the in-house wherewithal, there is still definitely a place for traditional managed hosting services. However as more organizations migrate towards different ways of purchasing and consuming infrastructure, it is time for managed hosting services to get a makeover to survive in the new cloud centric world.
Today it is common for a range of different types of organizations, including the US government, to have multiple environments in support of their applications, not just traditional tightly controlled monolithic infrastructure. They want to be able to mix and match the right supporting infrastructure regardless of where it is. The trade-off for this increased business and technical flexibility is the potential for introducing more complexity and integration headaches. Moving data across and among a mesh of hybrid infrastructures can be a challenge for many companies.
Despite the rapidly changing infrastructure landscape, there is still plenty of room for managed services, but they need to change to meet new customer demands.
Cloud IaaS services have quickly evolved into complex toolkits, more what can be properly called PaaS (Platform as a Service) environments. Organizations that try to manage a large application in a public cloud environment quickly find that the software development lifecycle can be just as complex, if not more so, than managing the same application on a rack of dedicated servers in a private data center.
[tweet]RT @VZCloud: Cloud IaaS services have quickly evolved into complex toolkits that surpass the PaaS label. http://t.co/W86LPBDJWP[/tweet]
The emerging models for Managed Hosting services include building automated support tools to manage cloud environments, or providing management services to support IaaS environments. Think of these as the new breed of managed hosting, where the vendor is supporting cloud environments instead of servers.
Another approach is cross platform managed support services for companies that still have substantial investments in co-location, but also need to incorporate public and private cloud components. This will allow companies that have need for a mix of public and private application environments to concentrate on their core business instead of having to maintain complex IT environments on their own.
No matter what type of cloud services are used to build applications, they still need to be managed and who better to manage them than professional services companies that already have the expertise to do it correctly.
