IDC Study Underlines Managed Hosting Benefits
A new paper released by the Interactive Data Corp. (IDC) revealed that small and medium-scale companies will find it more cost-efficient and practical to outsource their IT support functions to a third party provider. The white paper, entitled Saving Money and Energy through Outsourcing your Web hosting, reported that the internal management of IT functions may cease to be the best choice for these enterprises.
According to the IDC report, in spite of the significant costs of purchasing and managing an IT department in-house, about half of the businesses surveyed still opted to adopt this traditional model of management.
IDC’s paper questioned the practicality of having an in-house hosting department for businesses what with the rising costs of cooling and power systems as well as the growing need for green IT and managed hosting.
The firm mentioned that there are several factors that have to be considered for businesses to assess the practicality of in-house IT or if they are better off with contracting the services of server specialists. These factors include affordability, regulatory pressures, risk, power supply and environmental concerns. All these have to come into play with regards to the debate on whether to keep the traditional IT department or outsource the function to specialists.
Last month, IDC reported that virtual private servers and other related technology comprised about 16.5 percent of the global server market for the second quarter of this year. This is a significant increase from the 14.5 percent that was reported during the same quarter on the previous year.