This IDC Presentation analyzes the topline results from the hosting infrastructure services section of the 2008 U.S. WAN Manager Survey. This document examines the market from a demand-side perspective, focusing on the hosting strategies of small, medium-sized, and large United States–based businesses. The hosting-related questions in the survey explore a number of issues, including companies' use of third-party Web hosting services and factors influencing the decision to rely on external hosting service providers or to keep the hosting function in-house. Key survey findings include the following:

• Third-party hosting infrastructure services are gaining momentum. A total of 47% of respondents use completely outsourced or hybrid in-house/third-party solutions in 2008.
• Performance-oriented considerations (scalability, security, and redundancy) emerge alongside price as top decision factors for outsourced hosting infrastructure services.
• Hardware-oriented services (e.g., server management and backup/recovery) are the most commonly outsourced hosting infrastructure function, but services for server virtualization, load balancing, server OS management, and enterprise application management provide upselling opportunities for hosting infrastructure service providers
• Cloud computing has not yet taken over the hosting infrastructure world. A total of 19% of companies are currently using cloud computing services, but only 6% currently use cloud providers as their primary source of third-party hosting infrastructure services.