Hosted Services
IT industry has seen many revolutionary technologies. The computer itself in the early 70s, the ever-shrinking circuit boards, graphical user interface (Remember Windows 95), and the most important one of all, the Internet. Internet today is the single most important component of IT for businesses although it is not perceived that way in day to day life. For example, most businesses run ADSL connections to the Internet which doesn’t have service level agreements. None the less, it has become the centrepiece of technology world. And it is the Internet which is fuelling the growth of the next big revolution in IT, the hosted services. There are many names that you may have heard for it, for example Cloud Computing, Online Services, and Software as a Service etc, although not each of which mean the same thing.
Let’s look at what hosted services mean in very generic terms. Hosted services aim to basically replace the “server infrastructure” which resides at business premises traditionally. Instead of keeping or hosting your data and applications on your own server, hosted services allow you to host the same data and applications on a server which resides in a data centre. So your end user computers, instead of connecting through the local network to the server that used to reside at your own premises, will connect to the server which resides in the data centre over the Internet. This is how simple it is.
Benefits of Hosted Services
- No upfront cost for start up businesses or businesses with hardware
- Fixed predictable monthly cost
- No hassle and headache of IT maintenance
- Real-time scalability
- Pay-as-you grow model
- Excellent remote access to data and applications