There has been much talk and activity in the industry recently around ‘infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), part of which is about meeting your server computing needs through the use of hosted infrastructure rather than by installing and running equipment in your own data centre or computer room.

While there is obviously nothing new about the concept of hosted services per se, which have been around in the IT industry for the past 40 years, developments in the area of virtualisation, along with the emergence of more flexible service models, are raising the profile of the commodity or utility style infrastructure services under the ‘cloud computing’ umbrella.

In this short paper, we look at the current state of play with regard to hosted server offering and activity, and consider where the market is going as we look forward.