Written by Chris Medeiros

Managed cloud services rest somewhere on the spectrum of secure, private cloud hosting and economical, public cloud hosting. Public cloud hosting is more oriented towards cost effectiveness, thus sacrificing availability and security along the way. On the other hand, managed cloud services put greater emphasis on high availability and security ahead of cost.

Public cloud servers have to be purchased by the hour. On the contrary, managed cloud services are purchased on monthly contracts, and are ideal for businesses that run critical, long term enterprise applications. There are many benefits of incorporating a managed cloud service in your business, some of which include:

Network and Data Security

Secured and dedicated VLANs, IDS/IPS and firewalls can be incorporated for any cloud server. This provides high security and a purposeful network environment similar to private cloud servers. Data can be hosted offsite where multiple copies can be maintained on regular compliance.

Higher Availability

Managed cloud servers are built around a readily available private cloud design. Thus, redundancy is built-in with SAN storage, network security and multiple hosts. This offers you the ability to upgrade and maintain hardware and protects you from failover without having a maintenance frame.

Associates with Physical Servers

Database engines and applications that do not meet the performance requirements on virtual servers or need a physical server to run on in order to access the hardware resources can use a shared cloud server network. This dedicated network creates a physical and virtual hybrid of servers in the same system.

Resource Balancing and Automatic Failover

Managed cloud servers are built on VMware Enterprise to balance the virtualization technology, resource balancing and failover between hardware hosts. This provides automatic handling at virtual levels, allowing your managed cloud server to take advantage of high availability in case any of the hosts fail.

Economical

Managed cloud services are more economical than private cloud servers. And with the monthly payments, they can even be as economical as most open, public cloud servers. Long term enterprise applications generally do not run on an hourly basis. However, not all applications are designed to work with optimum efficiency on managed cloud services. Research computing, development and test servers are prime examples of systems that are non-critical and work with optimum efficiency on hourly pricing in public cloud servers. But then, many businesses want security and availability of corporate data, which only managed cloud servers, or private clouds provide. For such businesses, managed cloud services are ideal as they provide availability and security of private cloud servers at a small portion of their cost.