Thursday, August 20, 2009

Managed hosting 'attractive in tough times'

Managed hosting will prove popular in troubled economic times as such measures help firms cut costs, one expert has claimed.

Writing for Computing.co.uk, Forrester analyst Phil Sayer said that managed services thrive in difficult times as businesses look to cut spending and look to sign simple contracts for services that can be negotiated and implemented quickly.

"Under these circumstances, infrastructure managed services are attractive to firms. They enable them to reduce or avoid capital expenditure and to focus IT on areas of their business that are key to success and are not a commodity," he stated.

Mr Sayer added that hosting services will prove popular as firms do not have the ability to raise capital expenditure to build or expand data centres while financial pressures remain.

Recent findings from the National Outsourcing Association highlighted that outsourcing IT functions is expected to become more popular during the recession, with many forms looking to embrace such measures in the coming months.

Source

Monday, July 6, 2009

Calastone Selects 'Data Centre Operator of the Year' for Managed Business Hosting

LONDON, UNITED KINDOM -- (Marketwire) -- 06/25/09 -- Calastone Limited, the independent cross-border transaction network for the mutual funds industry, announced today that its data centre outsource provider, iomart Hosting, has been named Data Centre Operator of the Year 2009 in the annual 'Storrie' awards, organised by Storage Magazine.
In December 2008, Calastone selected iomart Hosting to provide its primary business hosting facilities and successfully transitioned to iomart's central London location in April this year. As part of this strategic development, Calastone has retained its previous data centre as a fully functioning disaster recovery (DR) site and will continue to invest further to ensure its capability to handle primary data centre volumes. This will mean that, should DR ever need to be invoked, the impact to customers will be minimised. Calastone's new primary data centre is located in London, with the DR data centre located in Scotland. This distance between Calastone's data centres is part of the design to ensure, should operations across London be subject to a major incident, that the potential impact to Calastone's DR site, and therefore customer service, are minimised.Ian Taylor, Chief Operating Officer of Calastone, said, "We congratulate iomart Hosting on their recent award. We were confident in our appointment of them as data centre outsource provider and this only affirms that we made the right decision.
Kevin Lee, Managing Director of Calastone added, "Our new data centre delivers on Calastone's strategic promise to customers and the market as a whole, to support its rapid growth in the connected customer community. By connecting to Calastone's global transaction network, participants will benefit from fully electronic STP throughout the transaction lifecycle, with their preferred messaging protocol."
The winner of the 'Storries' award is selected by readers of Storage Magazine who vote for, and reward, companies and services they believe have made significant contributions to the IT industry during the past year. It is understood that more than 20,000 votes were cast for this year's awards.
Angus MacSween, CEO, iomart Hosting stated: "We are naturally very pleased to have won such a prestigious award, and equally, we were delighted to have been appointed by Calastone. We worked closely with the team throughout the data centre transition and look forward to a fruitful partnership."

Source