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.
Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components wherever they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, or IaaS or PaaS in the cloud). This enables I&O teams to monitor the availability and resource utilization data of physical, virtual, software entities, and AI systems — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors, storage, and basic application monitoring. These tools collect data in near real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.