Application Hosting

What is Application Hosting?

The cost of implementing and supporting Information Systems can be daunting and expensive for organizations. Yet many of these organizations need the capabilities of the systems to function effectively and go after the markets required for sustained viability. An alternative is Application Hosting - Sometimes called Applications Service Provider (ASP). With Application Hosting a company that specializes in implementing maintaining and supporting software systems does all the heavy lifting. They implement the systems in a world class data center with all the protection offered. The SaaS model is utilized in that the business applications are rented or subscribed rather than being implemented internally. However, depending on the application, the subscription period might be longer than month to month.

Application Hosting Characteristics

The applications can and in many cases do, coexist with other business applications (See On-Premise Hosting for additional alternatives). Thus the application hosted capability tends to be more mission critical because of reliability or importance. Most systems used by businesses today can fit in the Application Hosting model. Some of the more common uses include, but are not limited to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), financial systems,Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Sales Force Automation, Project Management, and business integration systems. Application Hosting includes technical support, maintenance, upgrades, data back-ups, systems redundancy, help desks, and other tasks to ensure that the software is current and user issues are addressed. Depending on the needs of the organization, Application Hosting can also include business support, application administration and other ancillary tasks.

See Features and Benefits for additional information.
See On-Premise Solutions for information about hosting on-site.