By Jason Gaudreau
Mission-critical applications, such as customer-facing applications and financial systems, are vital to a smooth operation of the company’s business. These applications are core to the company’s mission, and system downtime translates to financial losses to the organization. While other applications, like general-purpose printing, software media libraries and infrastructure monitoring tools don’t require the same service-level capabilities as mission-critical applications.
Customer-facing applications provide new business opportunities and improved business capability; however, it is driving the need for decreasing recovery time objectives and more stringent service levels from a service availability perspective. We cannot treat all IT data center systems the same; some systems are more critical to the operation than others. Business requirements have changed over the past few years for system applications that drive business revenue; expectations are that systems are available 24×7, like online retail systems.
Because of the exploding number of applications, infrastructure growth and the high cost of downtime, IT organizations need to use their infrastructure resources to build service tiers that they offer their business partners. Not only will this help improve application performance, reliability and availability, but it can increase host density ratios, provide cost transparency for meeting the expected business requirements, and enable you to create process improvements from a service management perspective.
You can learn all the details and begin planning your hosted service strategy project by reading the Hosted Service Strategy Guide, written by Jason Gaudreau, Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware Professional Services. 
Jason Gaudreau is a Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware Professional Services. To read more from Jason, be sure to visit his blog here.
