The rapid development of cloud infrastructure is acting as a big catalyst for the development and growth of the Managed Hosting market. Gartner, which provides technology research and advice to clients across the world expects this evolution and growth in IT managed services powered by cloud enabled managed hosting to continue for many more years into the future. This view was highlighted in a recent blog post by Douglas Toombs, Gartner’s Research Director.

This type of evolution has already happened in the past: Infrastructure-as-a-Service has helped to develop infrastructure provisioning and management for many years now. Gartner has even changed the name of their Managed Hosting Magic Quadrant to Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting to align it to this changed scenario.

IAAS cloud platforms were developed several years ago in response to demands from customers who were looking to capitalize on the cost-saving and benefits that laaS offered. At that point of time, the customers were not fully equipped to deploy cloud-based services by themselves. There was an inherent need to provide IT managed services to enable them to capitalize on this new technology. Another desire that was expressed frequently by customers was the ability free themselves from the hassles of managing their IT infrastructure on their own. Most of these customers were large charities and government organizations, and they wanted to use Business IT Support to focus on their core business. Even though they were using cloud-based services through laaS regularly at that time, they had to maintain in-house departments for several IT service management and security. So clearly they needed Business IT Support to free up their time completely.

 Is IaaS right for me?

We are now seeing the beginnings of a move of smaller businesses to the cloud and IaaS platforms.  For many companies, the move is about portability.  Some of these customers don’t have a physical office, or don’t have the proper cooling or electrical setups in their office to accommodate the number of servers and/or equipment they need.  Hosting in the cloud makes sense for them, as it give all the users, no matter where they are located, access to the corporate infrastructure.  For other customers, especially those who have only one office and only one or two servers, it is more cost effective to have everything in-house. 

A third group of customers takes a “hybrid” approach, leave some services local and moving others to the cloud.  For example, we have been moving most of our customers with in-house Exchange servers to cloud-hosted platforms.  The decision where to host your servers, applications, data and backup can be a complex one.  We suggest working with us or another experienced MSP to decide if, when, and what to move to the cloud. For more information Get in touch with us: www.gravityusa.com