Hosted Solutions

Data hosting has rapidly become the preferred deployment method with IT personnel. The ability to access and manage applications, users and data content from any Internet connection provides the freedom to be more productive within your own organization. The ability to quickly scale your IT resources in hours, rather than days has boosted hosting providers sales to unprecedented levels.

In 2009, a leading IT industry analyst group conducted a study on hosted vs. non-hosted comparitve companies. Frost & Sullivan's Stratecast Partners shows companies that subscribe to hosted IT infrastructure services or applications see dramatic savings (up to 75%) compared to owning and operating their own infrastructure. In the research, Stratecast estimated the costs incurred for matching the functionality and quality of service for a company with less than 100 employees. Other independent studies showed that significant savings were realized even on the larger networks, although the percentage of savings diminished as the entities base network infrastructure became more complex. These larger networks (< 750 users) tended to have available staff and resources to monitor and manage company applications. Included in the cost evaluations were servers, security, firewalls, bandwidth, utilities and administration.

The technology driving this migration has matured dramatically over the last 10 years. "Virtualization", as it is commonly called, is simply a matter of storing everything in memory, including the operating system. Virtualization allows that section of memory to be moved from one computer to another, without interuption, and without the end users even being aware of the sudden change. This provides reliability previously untapped.

"Virtualization", in it's beginning, was relegated to an individual workstation. Developers would utilize the environment to "test" new versions of their applications or configurations, without corrupting their main environment. The "test" session could be quickly rolled back to it's original state if things didn't go quite right. Click the links to learn more on the history and the future of Virtualization.

• Wiki
• IBM an early leader: Network World
• Technical overview of early Virtualization
• Where Virtualization is headed: Virtual Strategy Magazine

Today, all of the major players have a significant investment in virtual technology. Microsoft has included the technology in it's most recent server operating systems. Vmware has it's own proprietary operating system for delivering a virtualized environment, and has taken the lead. Companies like Citrix, with it's "Zen" offerings, is well placed to compete within its niche. Apple computers now come with the option of a Virtual installation of Microsoft Windows. These are but a few of the large endeavors into the virtual initiative. More are appearing everyday.