The benefits of application hosting
Application hosting offers a variety of IT management and administrative benefits. The biggest benefits with hosting include lower acquisition and operating costs for technology.
While a business owner knows that there are costs associated with the equipment, software and other tangible elements, they may not consider the ongoing costs of maintaining and managing the system. End-user support, backups and data management, network security and virus protection, content filtering and lost productivity are all areas where the business spends time and money, but few businesses totally recognize these soft costs as being directly attached to their IT budget.
An application hosting service turns all of those tangible and intangible costs into predictable fixed expenses. Because the cost of the infrastructure (hardware, networking, datacenter, etc.) as well as engineering and technical support are all factored in to the cost of the service, the company no longer has to bear the direct costs of initial system acquisition, ongoing support and service, emergency break/fix, etc. This is not to say that an application hosting model will always be less expensive than a locally-installed system. But in many case, it is viewed as an insurance policy, protecting the business from what could happen. This is also why many businesses view the implementation of a hosted solution as part of their business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Having a separate system to fail over can be extremely expensive. Using an application hosting service can offer significantly more redundancy and protection than an in-house system, and the cost of that level of protection is also factored into the service fee.
Systrends provides hosting services for all our eTariff and EDI applications.