We hear this question often enough that I thought our readers might be interested in the answer that I recently posted on Proformative. Here's the link to the original post, which includes some other answers with helpful information: www.proformative.com/ask/question/what-difference-between-cloud-computing-managed-services. Here's my answer, from that same page:
"Managed services has been well explained here, and cloud computing with software as a service has been covered nicely as well. I would add that there are benefits possible with cloud computing – specifically, a public cloud environment, shared among multiple users - that leverage technology and the democratize high end computing in a way that managed services can’t. In a public cloud environment, these benefits provide high end capabilities to customers that would not otherwise be affordable to them.
While a public cloud environment requires careful attention to security, isolation, and process, it also offers significant management and cost advantages over the managed services model. For example, 100 managed service customers may require 200 or more servers to support. The same numbers of public cloud customers may only require something in the order of 20 servers with the appropriate management technology. The cost savings for a public cloud are evident, but these numbers actually translate into significantly improved security, since there are far fewer servers that need to be monitored.
Another benefit of a public cloud is 'high availability,' which basically boils down to this: there’s no single point of failure. In a managed services or an in-house, on-premise model, you would need to duplicate – at a minimum – every feature of your infrastructure to achieve high availability. In addition, a public cloud environment will include data management technology that is far beyond the average mid-market company’s budget, but can be provided cost effectively in a public cloud.
The choice of what’s right for your company depends on the type of technical service and software subscriptions you need, of course. But, there are compelling reasons for the popularity of the cloud model, chief among them being its ability to make high end computing available to companies who couldn’t afford the same level of technology in a comparable in-house system."
Tensoft provides solutions in a public cloud - rather than as managed services - because our customers want the benefits that I've outlined above. In fact, we use the same public cloud that we provide to our customers, so feel free to ask me how we like it!
