What Is Application Hosting and How Can It Be Beneficial

As per range of business dictionaries, Application hosting is defined as “the outsourcing of business applications to an application hosting or cloud hosting service provider, instead of installing the software internally”.

Previously some business enterprises use to conventionally host and maintain their applications on their local servers. Nowadays, majority of businesses and firms are looking into the advantages of outsourcing software along with related data of their business applications to third-party hosting providers. Companies are realizing that in addition to saving up time and financial resources, they take in further benefits such as departmental or company-wide training, safe data backup, and software upgrade services. SaaS (Software as a Service) is one of the model of cloud computing services, these off-site hosted applications incorporate easily with an organization’s existing data and IT systems. Moreover, as sales and customer demands may vary frequently during a specific accounting phase, employing SaaS applications comes with the flexibility businesses need to speedily respond to financial conditions and industrial demands.
Some of the business applications that can be hosted by application hosting service providers include:

● CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

● VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for Call Center Management

● DMS (Document Management Solutions

● Accountancy software

● Tax Applications and many more.

There are many things an enterprise needs to think about before transferring application/ data to a hosting vendor. One the main concern is security then there are issues like if business organization gets the liberty to choose application platform or not. Other things like basic infrastructure, upfront investment, response time, etc. are also in their mind.

Cloud hosting service provider provides a disaster recovery plan which is essential for most businesses and must consist of redundant backup systems. Cloud hosting service provider will ensure that your applications and your business can continue to function even when your main IT environment stop working due to natural or man made disasters.

Application hosting allows access to data regardless of platform and operating system. So user can access data/ application according to their convenience. Access to data cannot be restricted on the basis of location or time as well. Users are free to access their data from anyplace at anytime via internet connected gadget. To confirm data security accessibility is controlled via login ID and password. Multiple users can access data simultaneously from different places without any difficulty and share information. This facility saves users time and money both and make work convenient. This feature is especially beneficial for those who have multiple offices at different locations or those who need to work while travelling or from home.

Application hosting services are scalable on demand. So in case of sales or market fluctuation services can be raised or decreased instantly. As cloud computing services comes with pay as you go model it becomes cost efficient. Users who employ cloud services pay only for the services and resources utilized and not for the resources they predict can be useful in future.

Hence application hosting services are secure, flexible, economic and efficient. It provides expediency to the user and improves business productivity. Saved resources can be utilized for other business purposes. As hosting vendors takes care of maintenance and upgrades, users get time to focus on their core business. Companies with scarce resource specifically prefer application hosting services.