Gartner defines the data center outsourcing (DCO) services market as a comprehensive suite of services that support deployment, consolidation, optimization, modernization and managed services. These services primarily cater to data centers, private clouds, edge computing, ERP hosting, mainframes or legacy systems, midrange systems, infrastructure modernization, network and security. Organizations with such environments engage with DCO service providers to enhance efficiency, improve agility, optimize costs, strengthen security — physical, data and cyber — and realize substantial modernization benefits. Data center outsourcing refers to the strategic decision by organizations to delegate data center operations to a third-party service provider. Adopting this approach assists organizations with prioritizing their core business activities while capitalizing on the advanced technologies, operational expertise, best-in-class performance metrics and cost-efficiencies offered by vendors, compared to insourced best efforts.
Gartner defines managed hybrid cloud hosting (MHCH) as a standardized, productized offering that combines a cloud-enabled system infrastructure platform — consisting of a pool of compute, network and storage hardware — with cloud infrastructure framework software to facilitate self-service and rapid provisioning. In addition to offering this service from cloud infrastructure located in its own data center, the provider must offer a choice of using a hyperscale public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider or an Asian country-specific, large-scale IaaS provider. The infrastructure platform should be located both in a service provider's data center for the cloud-enabled system infrastructure (CESI) platform and in an Asia country for the public IaaS platform. It also requires the use of a standardized deployment across all service provider customers and leverages a single codebase.