Managed Hosting: Still Relevant Despite Cloud's Rise

If you've been reading the press, you could be forgiven for assuming that enterprise-class managed hosting would have transitioned entirely to the cloud by now. Yet the pace of managed hosting's demise, like that of the mainframe, has been largely exaggerated. Managed hosting remains a viable and growing market, serving an expanding range of solutions while also representing a fully managed, IT-provisioned alternative to self-managed and provisioned cloud services. As such, it remains attractive and suitable for customers seeking to retain control over their IT environments. Managed hosting remains a strong option for mission-critical applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) but also emerging technologies like analytics and big data. Sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals charged with charting a path of transition to the cloud can assume that managed hosting will remain a viable delivery vehicle for applications workloads for at least the next five years.