Five key points for choosing the right IT hosting

Whether it is a first outsourcing initiative or a change of provider, the first step is to define the level of outsourcing and its scope. Indeed, it is on this foundation that the hosting contract and the associated services will be built.

As regards scope, while IT has indeed been undergoing a major move towards "cloudification" in recent years, companies do not outsource their entire information system. In practice, it is a matter of determining, case by case, what must or can be outsourced according to numerous criteria: strategy, level of competitiveness and the company’s sector, corporate culture, level of digital maturity, social context (the issues are not the same in the private and public sectors), size and skills of internal teams, obsolescence of the data center facilities, condition of the machine fleet, criticality level and number of application users, connectivity, data location and security, etc.

For its part, the degree of outsourcing implies different realities, particularly in terms of the human resources assigned to operations. With colocation, the company rents usable floor space and energy in usable kWh. It remains the owner of its machines and retains control over their administration and operation. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) sits one level above: the hardware infrastructure (servers, networks, storage) is no longer owned by the company, but it can still manage the middleware and applications itself. PaaS (Platform as a Service), meanwhile, includes a runtime environment administered by the provider. Whereas with SaaS solutions, the ultimate stage of outsourcing, the entire application is managed by the vendor.

While it is of course essential to consider the technical and technological aspects offered by the hosting provider (network connectivity, type of machines, virtualisation systems, disaster recovery plan, operating routines, etc.), an outsourcing or migration project goes far beyond these issues. It leads to significant organisational and social transformations within the company and must therefore be supported by rigorous change management so that all stakeholders (IT, procurement and legal) are involved and drive what is, in fact, a company-wide project. In practical terms, six months to two years are required to complete it, depending on the degree and scope of outsourcing.

Positioning, hardware and services offered, operations, pricing: everything differs from one hosting provider to another. As a result, it is not easy to compare their offerings. This is why, for any project covering a relatively large IT scope, tenders should be preceded by a request for information. This preliminary step makes it possible to better define needs (dedicated or shared infrastructure, dedicated or shared private cloud, hybrid system, etc.), assess the level and quality of support from the companies consulted, and anticipate the projected cost of the future solution. This reference budget is also essential for measuring potential gains compared with in-house hosting, before moving—or not—into the tender phase.

Companies established in several countries may seek to contract with a single hosting provider. Even though the trend is towards harmonisation of offerings at European, or even international, level, contractual commitments on service levels and operating procedures, as well as data protection regulations, vary from one country to another. In other words, it may sometimes be preferable to proceed country by country, selecting the best offering in each territory.

Data centers are now places where networks and platforms interconnect. As such, hosting providers increasingly offer direct connections to public cloud offerings such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or IBM Bluemix, or to private cloud, to meet their customers’ need to occasionally access more computing power and storage capacity. This ability to support hybridisation, a guarantee of agility, can therefore be a factor in choosing a future hosting provider.