Categories of Managed Services

There are basically three categories of managed services that cover physical hosting of equipment, network infrastructure management and security. Each is service is offered by companies that focus on the particular areas.

Hosting services are currently offered by a handful of international providers linked with the various carriers as well as by numerous regional companies that have carved out a successful niche for themselves. They are referred to as Infrastructure Hosting Service Providers. Network Infrastructure Management is the management of the equipment either at a hosting center or at enterprise premises. These services are often offered by companies on a national or international basis, since location of the monitoring center is pretty much irrelevant to where the equipment is located. Security Management is a specialized set of services that focus on securing the data and access to the data. These services tend to be configuration consulting as well as remote management of security devices.

Infrastructure Hosting Service

Often referred to as co-location or hosting, these services are offered through providers that supply space, bandwidth and sometimes full configurations for web hosting, disaster recovery or hot and cold backup sites and a number of related uses.

Infrastructure Management Service

Services offered that provide remote monitoring and management (restart, patch updates, etc.) for network infrastructure components such as switches, routers, servers, operating systems, databases and applications.

Managed Security Services

Management of perimeter security, firewalls, intrusion detection devices, including the planning, configuration and incident response fall into managed security. With such regulations as GLB (and Access to Information Act in Canada) and HIPAA, these unique services are critical for a corporations ability to securely manage customer data.

Storage Management Services

Storage Management Services includes a wide array of offerings that share the primary goal of providing cost effective solutions to data storage, management and backup from specialized systems housed in data centers around the globe.