Managed Services and the Cloud: 'Breakaway' Strategies
As conference participants in a
recent CompTIA Breakaway can probably tell you, managed services and cloud computing are closely related both in character, scalability, practice and growth as an IT strategy.
The two IT phenomena have often been called "cousins," that complement each other in a processing environment.
Sure enough, it'll be a lot easier for either an SMB firm or an IT service shop to leap to cloud computing as a viable business strategy if there is an existing familiarity with the managed service platform.
As Jason Beal, Director of Services Sales for Ingram Micro North America has often opined, "The trend toward cloud computing is a lot like the growth of managed services."
To that end, the popularity of the two approaches (cloud computing and managed services) are growing in tandem as well.
As this whitepaper explains, the delivery model for both cloud computing and managed service platforms have the potential to radically change the way SMB and enterprise organizations think about IT as well as how they rollout their computing capacity to internal users, staff, partners and customers.
If you need hard numbers, consider this: analyst group Gartner has some compelling statistics for skeptics. Gartner says the global cloud services market could surpass $68 billion in revenue by the end of this year. That's a 16.6 percent jump from last year's actual revenue of $58.6 billion. Get this though, Gartner projects industry revenues of $148.8 billion by 2014.
That's something to consider because the delivery model for cloud services are similar and in some cases identical to a managed service model.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on August 02, 2010