To address data center closures, consolidation, migrations as well as emerging core-to-edge initiatives, organizations look towards colocation providers to provide additional services besides the traditional space, power and cooling. Today, the lines of distinction between retail, wholesale and managed service providers are blurred by colocation providers offering additional services to address hybrid and digital transformation initiatives. Organizations use colocation services with data center interconnect fabrics to integrate multiple applications, data types and data sources in a secure, predictable, lower-latency fashion enabling digital business success. In many cases, data centers are transforming into noncore, remote facilities relegated to non-x86 workloads and legacy applications. Some colocation providers offer interconnection services to enable edge-to-core digital objectives.
The DRaaS market provides for the recovery of enterprise applications at another location in the event of a disaster. The provider can deliver the service as a fully managed, assisted recovery or as a self-service offering. The service should be marketed and sold as a stand-alone, industrialized offering and include, at a minimum: - An on-demand recovery cloud for planned tests, exercises and declarations - Server image and production data replication to the cloud - Automated failover and failback between production and the target cloud environment - Recovery time SLAs
Gartner defines public cloud IT transformation services (PCITS) as services designed to deliver transformational outcomes via the utilization of cloud-native professional and managed services. It includes migration, modernization and the building of new transformational solutions on public hyperscale cloud infrastructure and platform services. Organizations seeking to use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and similar platforms engage with providers in this market to realize the greatest transformational benefits. PCITS transforms client applications, workloads and data to the public cloud to achieve their clients’ business outcomes. It makes primary use of cloud-native tools and manages IT operations in the public cloud. It encapsulates cloud management, optimization and modernization to continuously manage reliability, scalability, interoperability and more.