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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
6 criteria for selecting
the best managed hosting
provider for your business
CONSIDERATIONS CHECKLIST
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Executive Summary
Managed Dedicated Server Hosting Providers take
on the management and monitoring of servers to free
an organization’s IT staff to perform mission critical or
value-added activities. They also offer a raft of additional
benefits — including high reliability, performance, security,
and compliance — more cost effectively than if the
organization managed its own servers in-house.
But with the large number of managed dedicated
server hosting providers in the marketplace, how does
an organization choose the right one? This buyer’s guide
describes factors that organizations should consider in
order to ensure that the managed dedicated server provider
not only meets current technical requirements, but helps
deliver a competitive advantage both now and in the future.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Why do many consider managed dedicated server
hosting providers?
Managed dedicated server hosting providers allow
organizations to leave the management and monitoring
of their operating systems to someone else to free up
their IT staff for other mission critical tasks. These services
deliver the reliability, security, and compliance industry
and executive leaders expect. Managed dedicated
service hosting providers also deliver 24/7 device
monitoring, management and support on through
problem resolution, removing the burden of tier 1
support from engineering staff.
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The best providers deliver additional advantages over
managing servers in-house. Because managed dedicated
server hosting providers leverage their infrastructure over
multiple customers and can negotiate volume discounts,
these services reduce cost of ownership. They offer
predictable expenses for ongoing operations and keep
costs in line with service levels. Unlike many in-house
operations, service providers ensure that their systems
always have the latest patches and upgrades so servers
operate at an optimum level and according to the customer’s
specifications. Customers benefit from better security
because the service provider delivers multiple levels
of physical and virtual network security.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
So many choices
Selecting the right provider is imperative to achieving
the promise of greater agility, reduced expenses,
decreased risk, and increased resiliency. Yet, choices
abound. Forrester Research, Inc.1 defines four broad
categories of managed services providers that also
offer dedicated server hosting options:
• “Hybrid value-added resellers (VARs). VARs are
getting into the managed services business to obtain
predictable annuity revenue streams, improve their
margins on product sales, and increase profitability
through value-added services, primarily because
implementation services and product sales revenues
are waning. Moreover, the managed services model is
a natural extension to VARs’ on-site support business.
• Telcos. Telcos are complementing their managed network
services business. They enter the managed services market
(often through acquisition) to break into the IT infrastructure
management outsourcing market by leveraging their
broadband Internet connectivity and remote management
services to become one-stop outsourcing providers. For
example, 2011 was a busy year for EarthLink in acquiring
Business Vitals, Logical Solutions, One Communications,
Synergy, and xDefenders. Fortunately for Telcos, tech
vendors tend to prioritize them over other service providers
and often give them first-mover advantage, as evidenced
in Microsoft’s Office 365 partner ecosystem rollout.
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• Tech vendors. Some tech vendors are going direct with
managed services. They enter the managed services
arena to augment their services portfolios or to counter
competitor moves, often through acquisition, and as
complements to their traditional outsourcing services
and project-based offerings, as did HP, IBM, and
Symantec. Often they don’t trust their channel partners
to effectively deliver and support cloud service solutions
and go on their own as a result. Naturally, this go-tomarket approach generates intense channel conflict.
• Cloud infrastructure/software service providers.
As infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and other cloud
services merge, scores of midsize cloud infrastructure
and software service providers are aggressively aggregating
cloud services and are building or leasing infrastructure
to develop their own cloud offerings. Of the four core
competitive players, these entrants are expected to
be among the most nimble and opportunistic.”
Each of these categories contains numerous vendors that
offer overlapping services. All of this increases the difficulty
of finding the service provider that will best suit your needs.
1“Market Overview: Managed Service Providers, Part 2,” by Jonathan Silber,
Forrester Research Inc., May 6, 2013
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
6 Criteria for selecting a managed
dedicated server hosting provider
When choosing a managed dedicated server provider, look for
a company that addresses the following six primary customer
challenges and offers these capabilities:
Business and IT transformation
Ensure optimal resiliency and availability
Security and compliance
Visibility into and control over the IT environment
Increase operational IT efficiencies to do more with less
Simplify relationships with key service providers
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Business and IT transformation
Technology has the potential to help organizations gain
competitive advantage by allowing them to offer new
services, enable new business models, and increase speed
to market. Yet many organizations are held back from using
technology to enable innovation because they’re locked
into inflexible legacy systems. These organizations need
to transform their infrastructure to become more agile and
responsive to their business. But while it’s important to
modernize the infrastructure and adopt new technologies,
such as the Cloud, organizations can’t replace everything.
They need to upgrade select services, leverage their existing
environment, integrate all of their systems, and operate
the overall environment in a seamless manner.
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To meet these requirements, a managed dedicated
server hosting provider needs to offer:
• The experience, skills, and resources to plan for and
manage the inherent complexity of a hybrid environment ­—
including everything from the public cloud, private cloud,
managed services and legacy systems.
• Expertise in managing hybrid environments and an
understanding of the key interdependencies will simplify
an organization’s migration path, reduce the number
of vendors and handoffs the organization needs to
manage, as well as provide higher quality service.
• A broad portfolio of services that spans the entire
lifecycle, from strategy and design, through
transition, to operation is also critical. Breadth of
capabilities gives customers more choices and
greater flexibility while driving down costs.
• An understanding key infrastructure and
application interdependencies, which will
enable them to provide better design,
smoother implementation and higher
service delivery quality.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Ensure optimal resiliency and availability
A managed dedicated server hosting provider should:
The bar for operational resilience is very high. Customers
and end-users expect business and IT services to be “always • Demonstrate experience and expertise in designing
or planning for resilient IT architectures.
on” and available. Organizations need to guarantee business
• Know how to analyze, design, and ensure availability
operations under any conditions. Thus, they need optimal
throughout the entire IT environment from production
resiliency and availability designed into and maintained
to recovery to security to improve infrastructure and
across all elements of their IT environment.
application performance and reduce maintenance costs.
• Be able to manage availability across the network,
infrastructure, security, application, and legacy
environments. This ensures quality across hybrid
infrastructure so organizations don’t have to worry
about managing all of the individual pieces.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Security and compliance
Organizations need to guard against evolving security
threats, reduce operational risk and ensure timely and
cost-effective compliance.
Look for a managed dedicated server hosting provider that:
• Has the skills, resources, tools and processes to
comprehensively and cost-effectively patch heterogeneous
software and systems in a scalable and timely manner.
These services can prevent security failures and simplify
compliance with regulatory standards.
• Has the ability to proactively minimize the threat of security
breaches and effectively and efficiently respond when
a breach occurs. Data centers that house the managed
services infrastructure and customer environments should
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be protected by multiple layers of physical security to
ensure that critical systems and data are protected under
a broad range of conditions. Look for data centers that
are certified to ISO 20000-1 and have an annual SSAE
16 Type II audit. The service provider should secure data
by implementing a defense in depth strategy that employs
multiple technologies spanning all layers of defense.
• Has in place a comprehensive quality assurance program
to ensure certification or compliance with internationally
recognized industry standards. The service provider
should also collect and report the right audit data to
help satisfy customers’ corporate governance, risk
and compliance programs.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Visibility into and control over the IT environment
Because IT is so critical to the operation and competitive
advantage of any business, organizations want to retain
a high level of control over their IT environment when
they work with a service provider.
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Look for a managed dedicated server hosting provider that:
• Doesn’t make users feel like a number. They should
assign named and dedicated resources to support each
customer’s needs. The more the service provider’s support
resources know about the customer’s business and
technical environment the easier they’ll be to work with
and the more able they’ll be to answer questions and
provide proactive feedback.
• Offers customized service delivery capabilities
to meet customers’ unique business or technical
requirements.
• Provides contractually-obligated service level
agreements with penalties to hold themselves
accountable to customer expectations.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Increase operational IT efficiencies to do more with less.
IT budgets are essentially flat. And the management
of existing applications consumes a majority of these
budgets. To increase spending on new discretionary
projects that bring high value to the business,
organizations need to reduce their costs for
maintaining and operating existing systems.
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A managed dedicated server hosting provider
should be able to:
• Leverage investments in capital, infrastructure,
automation and management technology to share
costs of expert resources and repeatable processes
across a wide range of situations and environments.
• Deliver strong process management, following best
practices to reduce problem resolution cost and time.
• Furnish multi specialty IT professionals to deliver
comprehensive technical, administrative and
engineering support. The provider should be
able to allocate the appropriate level of personnel
with the requisite skills and certifications that
best fit the needs and demands of the
customer’s IT infrastructure.
• Develop and train this technical staff to
keep them as current and expert as
possible. As a result, the right service
provider can reduce cost per problem
as their experts can solve issues
faster or do things right the first
time to reduce rework.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Simplify relationships with key service providers
Many organizations are using a selective approach to
outsourcing. They are partnering with multiple IT services
providers, rather than a traditional single outsourcer.
Yet they may find that they have too many vendors
to manage. And that these vendors saddle them
with inflexible terms and services.
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Organizations need a managed dedicated server
hosting provider that’s easy to do business with.
Look for a service provider that:
• Delivers a breadth of service capability that can be
integrated into a single solution, allowing organizations
to manage fewer vendors.
• Embraces working with other providers in a well
orchestrated multi-sourced environment if the
organization needs to continue using multiple vendors.
• Provides financial and contractual flexibility to meet
their customer’s unique requirements.
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HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MANAGED DEDICATED SERVER HOSTING PROVIDERS: A BUYER’S GUIDE
Conclusion
Additional reading
By following this checklist, organizations can ensure that they
select a managed dedicated server hosting provider that can
meet their technical requirements today — and that can not
only continue to serve these needs in the future but can also
address their most pressing business requirements.
Hybrid IT Strategy
as a Path Forward
How Will You Perform
in a High Availability
Economy?
About Sungard Availability Services
Sungard Availability Services provides managed
IT services, information availability consulting
services, business continuity management
software, and disaster recovery services.
Trademark information
Sungard Availability Services is a trademark
of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its affiliate
used under license. All other trade names
are trademarks or registered trademarks
of their respective holders.
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or call 1-888-270-3657
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