Description

With managed cloud infrastructure services—also called Managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)—businesses engage a third-party provider to procure, configure, manage, and/or maintain the cloud infrastructure supporting their workloads. But there’s an irony here. By definition, IaaS is on-demand, self-service, automated, elastic, and pay-per-use. Yet, managed cloud infrastructure services are usually contract-bound, high-touch, manual, pre-defined in scope, and fixed-price.

Suppose that managed cloud services were modeled on cloud services. That is, suppose providers offered flexible managed cloud services that allow businesses to select and pay for just the assistance they need, when and for as long as they need it.

Two market leaders in managed cloud services—Rackspace and CenturyLink—have recently launched new managed services models that introduce cloud-like characteristics (such as self-servicing, flexible terms, and usage-based pricing). While the services are too new to reliably gauge market acceptance, Stratecast believes they represent a turning point for managed services, giving enterprises greater control over service delivery and costs.