What is Managed Cloud Hosting?

For many enterprises, the private cloud is the first choice when it comes to cloud computing. Private cloud computing offers a hardware and network environment that is dedicated solely to the enterprise.  Whether delivered through a hosted private cloud or internal private cloud, there is an assurance that the hardware, data storage and network security are dedicated to a single organization and not shared with other users.  When it comes to highly sensitive corporate data, personal customer lists, PCI or HIPAA certified environments, the private cloud is preferred.

At the same time, businesses are recognizing the benefit of the public cloud for some of their applications.  Many small and mid-size businesses need the quality of an enterprise private cloud in terms of high availability, redundancy and security with the affordability of a shared cloud.  Enterprises need the ability to move non-critical, non-sensitive computing and development work out of their private cloud into a shared cloud but need to achieve a similar level of availability and security.

There are a number of public cloud options available.  Some like Amazon’s EC2 are basic cloud servers designed to provide the lowest cost computing services for non-critical applications like web or development servers.  Others are designed to deliver the high availability and security that enterprises require in their private clouds.  The later, we call Managed Cloud Hosting.

Wikipedia defines a Virtual Private Cloud as “a private cloud existing in a shared or public cloud”.  The Managed Cloud is a Virtual Private Cloud – with one or more cloud servers in a shared environment that deliver the same level of data protection and network security as a dedicated private cloud.  The Managed Cloud can sit on same VLAN with a dedicated private cloud and managed servers to provide a completely integrated system.

In addition, by connecting a Managed Cloud into a hosted private cloud on a dedicated VLAN behind a dedicated firewall, the virtual private cloud provides a tremendous level of flexibility and expandability beyond the private cloud’s dedicated hardware, without compromising the data integrity or network security of the private cloud.