Forrester predicts 2010 to be a critical year for IT infrastructure management operations. Seems like enterprises will be heading towards recovery in this post recession era with new project initiatives.

Some of the top priorities of CIOs in 2009 according to Gartner were business process improvement, reducing enterprise costs and increasing enterprise workforce effectiveness. The top few technologies which reined ground were servers and storage technologies, collaboration technologies, networking, voice and data communications, security technologies and technical infrastructure.

Some of the top priorities in 2010 will be:

• Consolidation, virtualization, automation and cloud
• Intelligence around infrastructure management with focus on KPIs and other metrics to monitor and improve performance
• Transformation from tech-silos to service delivery organizations with focus on ITIL frameworks

Everest Group predicts that the Remote Infrastructure Management operations market is expected to touch $8.6B in 2010 while The Yankee Group predicts the managed services market to grow to $10B by end of next year. McKinsey states that between 2008 and 2010 the non labor costs are going to fall by almost 54% as a result of emerging technologies such as virtualization.

In 2010, as the economy comes out of recession, SMBs will be more willing to spend again, but only for solutions that will provide demonstrable bottom and/or top line business benefits. SMBs will spend only if they believe that the investment will help them operate more profitably, grow revenues, increase productivity, save money or gain time-to-market advantages. SMBs are also evaluating and making trade-offs in areas that offer strategic, long-term advantages vs. those that meet more urgent, short-term needs. In many cases, IT investments must also be weighed against requirements for other core goods and services essential to the business.

For the foreseeable future, SMBs’ will continue to take a hybrid approach to technology, combining on-premise and public cloud-based solutions to satisfy business requirements. In 2010, vendors will offer a greater range of targeted solutions for hybrid environment requirements to spur SMB interest and traction. Virtual desktops, business continuity/disaster recovery, on-demand computing and storage will feature prominently in vendors’ lineups

According to the recent survey by Rackspace, IT managers face daily challenges in controlling the environment that could drive companies to consider managed hosting and cloud computing alternatives. The survey found that about one-third of the IT staff time is consumed with server management tasks and close to 60% of the 500 IT managers polled cited the hassle of managing servers. This basically means that a huge chunk of time and resources are spent on non-core/ contextual activities ‘de-focusing’ the enterprise from their core/mission critical objectives. This leaves them with absolutely no time for strategic/value-added activities resulting in lost revenues and market shares. When asked if managed hosting or cloud computing can address these challenges, about one-third of the companies expected to outsource their services to a hosting company in the next 2-5 years.

Some of the biggest challenges for SMBs today include:

• Increased messaging: maintaining email functionality, data retention, and protection against spam, phishing, viruses, worms, spyware and other threats.
• DNS services getting increasingly complex: DNS records configuration and management, administering multiple domains, vulnerabilities from DNS-based buffer overflow attacks.
• Storage, data backup and data recovery requirements are growing: continuous data protection, incremental backup, and off-site data management (SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, CRM).
• Network and security management will continue to command more attention—and resources: firewall configuration, scanning for malware, check sum changes in software on the server, bandwidth and port monitoring to assess ongoing risks.
• Disaster recovery and business continuity are essential, but rarely planned out thoroughly in advance: protecting against loss of sensitive data and network connectivity, downtime, reboots, service failures, power outages and other disruptions.

Managed hosting helps address most of these challenges by providing extensive monitoring,enhanced security, personalized support with cost savings and guaranteed resources to address complex needs. On the flip side however, hosting can become expensive if you are using managed hosting for fairly basic/simple hosting. Sometimes, you might not have complete control of hosting functionality since you are handing over all the controls. So you got to assess your needs and priorities. It however cannot be denied that managed hosting is leading the charge.