Today’s enterprises are operating in an environment where infrastructure decisions carry far more weight than they did even a decade ago. Infrastructure strategy has become a central concern, and decisions about where and how to operate workloads now influence competitiveness and resilience just as much as daily IT performance. Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are now the default, while artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from pilot projects into business-critical production systems. In the meantime, global supply chains remain unpredictable, with longer procurement cycles for critical components, elevating the status of infrastructure management from an operational function to a board-level priority.
Yet, many IT departments remain constrained by limited staff, rising costs, and outdated systems, forcing them to make difficult tradeoffs between keeping the lights on and driving innovation.
All this accentuates the importance of solutions that can make it easier to navigate all this complexity: managed services solutions.
Surveys confirm the scope of the challenge. HashiCorp’s 2025 Cloud Complexity Report shows that 97% of organizations face difficulties managing cloud environments, with more than half citing hybrid or multi-cloud as the primary obstacle. Deloitte forecasts that hyperscale AI deployments will add unprecedented demand for power and specialized hardware, straining already limited capacity. The gap between infrastructure resources and business needs is widening.
In this blog, we’ll look at why managed services in colocation are the smart infrastructure choice in today’s context. We’ll dive into how colocation providers offering managed services solutions are pivoting away from the landlord function and becoming operational partners, helping enterprises redirect resources from daunting maintenance tasks to innovation. Let’s begin.
The Expanding Complexity of Infrastructure Management: A Growing Challenge
Managing infrastructure has grown more complex than incremental scaling and routine patching. Distributed clouds, specialized workloads, aging systems, supply chain volatility, and economic pressure require strategies that are adaptive and consistently reviewed.
Rising AI demands are putting a strain on existing systems, and constant supply delays make future capacity increasingly difficult to predict. Together, these pressures are reshaping infrastructure management and forcing enterprises to rethink how they balance stability with long-term growth. In this context, managed services are no longer an optional extra, but are slowly becoming more of a necessity.
In the following, we’ll explore the factors that contribute to infrastructure management becoming harder.
The Increasing Complexity of Hybrid / Multi-Cloud
Organizations are increasingly adopting mixed deployments across public cloud, private data centers, and edge sites. Many organizations recognize multi/hybrid cloud complexity as their top challenge, and many survey respondents are struggling with cloud infrastructure overall.
Key sources of complexity include:
- Tool sprawl. Enterprises now operate with an average of five separate cloud management tools. Overlapping functions and fragmented dashboards create gaps in monitoring and governance.
- Incompatible APIs. Each cloud platform maintains a unique interface, which complicates integration and slows down automation efforts across different environments.
- Fragmented identity and security domains. Security policies are often enforced differently across providers, increasing the risk of misconfigurations and compliance gaps.
- Variable performance guarantees. Workloads running in parallel across multiple clouds may experience inconsistent latency or throughput, making it more challenging to predict the end-user experience.
- Heterogeneous architectures. Enterprises must coordinate containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal deployments, all while maintaining consistent governance and operational standards.
The result is growing operational strain: visibility, integration, and cost control across multi-cloud environments are now among the most persistent challenges IT leaders face.
Growing AI/ML Workload Demands
AI and ML workloads further magnify unpredictability. Many IT teams struggle to forecast compute, memory, and I/O requirements with rapidly evolving workloads and new models appearing mid-cycle. Infrastructure environments designed for general virtualization or traditional enterprise workloads often can’t sustain the throughput or density required by large language models and inference pipelines.
Deloitte’s 2025 AI Infrastructure Survey notes that as hyperscale AI deployments expand, data center operators are planning to build facilities with power draw exceeding 2,000 MW per site, which is far larger than many currently built facilities. Meanwhile, Bain warns that demand for computing power in AI is outpacing capital investment, creating a shortfall in infrastructure supply. The mismatch between aggressive AI expansion and infrastructure lead times forces many organizations to cope with underprovisioned or strained systems.
Old Hardware and Outdated Technology
Many enterprises run infrastructures that have accumulated over the years, with heterogeneous generations of servers, network fabrics, and storage arrays. Equipment that seemed state-of-the-art in earlier cycles now struggles to meet modern demands, particularly in terms of latency, throughput, and parallelism. Incremental refreshes cannot always keep pace with the volume of changes.
Replacing functional but underperforming systems is, however, in most cases, a tough business case. Capital investments may be deferred in anticipation of the next innovation; yet sticking with older systems carries risks: higher failure rates, higher power-per-workload costs, incompatibility issues, and reduced headroom for new workloads. Over time, the buildup of such “technical debt” itself imposes a growing maintenance and coordination burden.
Supply Chain Disruptions
Hardware acquisition has lost the predictability it once had, and lead times that previously averaged a few weeks now extend into several months (driven by semiconductor export restrictions and broader geopolitical shifts). Logistics delays are becoming more and more persistent, and this also contributes to the difficulties enterprises face when trying to set realistic timelines for deployment.
The effects are especially visible in AI infrastructure. GPU and accelerator production is concentrated among a limited number of vendors, and allocation often favors hyperscalers over enterprise buyers. Beyond raising costs, this dynamic slows down rollouts and forces many organizations to commit to infrastructure capacity before they can fully validate workload requirements.
Economic Uncertainty and Growing Costs
IT spending is facing tighter review across industries. BCG’s IT Spending Pulse 2025 shows budgets rising by 4.6 percent in 2025, compared to 3.5 percent the year before. That growth sounds positive, but it is not spread evenly. Many enterprises still need to weigh priorities carefully and decide which projects move forward and which ones have to wait.
Simultaneously, cost pressures continue to increase due to inflation, rising energy rates, tariffs, and supply chain constraints. In some cases, component prices (servers, storage, networking) have also risen. During these periods, building new capacity is more expensive. Infrastructure teams have to absorb or pass through these periods and still deliver performance, reliability, and flexibility.
These pressures represent an abrupt escalation in operational difficulty. Traditional infrastructure approaches, where operations teams adjust capacity slowly and respond to incidents reactively, are becoming increasingly unsuited to this environment.
How Managed Services is Becoming the Solution
A big chunk of the pressure is on the shoulders of infrastructure teams. Hybrid architectures, the rapid growth of AI, and ongoing supply chain and economic risks are pushing traditional operations to their limits. In many organizations, the IT staff spends more time reacting to problems, juggling too many tools, and dealing with fragmented visibility than focusing on innovation.
Managed services are becoming the solution by shifting the burden of operational complexity to a provider whose core competence is infrastructure operations. This results in organizations regaining strategic focus: their internal teams can concentrate on outcomes (application innovation, analytics, business logic, etc., while an external team handles the full stack of infrastructure governance, monitoring, capacity, performance, security, and routine maintenance.
With managed services in colocation environments, the customer retains control of architecture, data, and service policies, but no longer needs to staff and maintain the underlying infrastructure. The provider becomes the steward of the infrastructure, and with it, the operational risk.
Why Managed Services are the Pragmatic Solution
- Speed of operational maturity: Many enterprises would require years and a large investment to build robust operations tooling, telemetric systems, automation workflows, and cross-vendor expertise. A mature managed services provider offers that operational baseline immediately.
- Economies of specialization: Infrastructure operations benefit from scale, repeatability, and the consolidation of best practices across clients. Providers can invest in tooling, analytics, and staff training in ways a single enterprise can rarely justify.
- Risk transfer and predictability: SLAs, structured change control, incident governance, and escalation frameworks shift portions of operational risk to the provider. Predictable pricing models replace the unpredictable burden of overtime, outages, and crisis response as well.
- Modular adoption with co-management: Many managed service models support phased adoption: the customer may retain some operations (e.g., patching or capacity planning) while handing off others (monitoring, incident remediation), making the transition less abrupt.
- Operational optimization and continuous improvement: As the provider is accountable for SLAs and performance, there is an incentive to refine processes, reduce waste, improve automation, and adopt cost-saving practices (right-sizing, cooling optimization).
- Faster scaling and responsiveness: Rather than building incrementally and waiting for internal capacity to catch up, customers can rely on the provider’s elastic ability to onboard workloads, expand monitoring, or spin up new capacity under existing contracts.
In many cases, adopting managed services is not about shedding control, but about substituting a steady, professional operations foundation for the uncertainty of internal scaling. The question shifts from “Can we staff and build operations?” to “Which operations regime offers the right balance of control, cost, and responsiveness?”
How Managed Services Can Bring Fast Results
One of the strongest arguments for a managed services approach is the speed with which the positive impact can be obtained. Below are the key pathways by which managed services can deliver measurable benefits within a short period of time.
Rapid Onboarding and Baseline Stabilization
When a managed services provider takes over operations, the first agenda is establishing visibility: connecting monitoring, telemetry, alerting, and dashboards. Legacy blind spots (across network, storage, and compute domains) are among the first to be revealed, exposing misconfigurations and capacity risks. Within weeks, the provider can begin triaging and stabilizing system health, as well as aligning operational norms.
Incident and Outage Remediation
Many enterprises experience significant “operational debt”, recurring incidents, firefights, or under-resourced teams. A managed operations team relieves pressure immediately. They carry defined incident management workflows, escalation paths, root cause investigations, and coordinated postmortem discipline. The cumulative impact is fewer repeated failures, faster recovery, and reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
Efficiency Gains Through Automation and Tooling
Serving multiple customers gives providers the scale to invest in automation, AI-driven monitoring, and orchestration tools that would be costly for a single enterprise to build alone. Over time, routine tasks as patching, backup checks, and alert handling move from manual work to automated workflows, which frees up staff and lowers the risk of mistakes. In some environments, runbook automation has cut repetitive operations by as much as 40-60%, showing how quickly these efficiencies can take hold.
Capacity Planning and Proactive Scaling
With data visibility and trend analysis, a managed services team can spot underutilized resources, pressure points, or growth trajectories earlier than internal teams often do. This allows smoother scaling (e.g., ordering or prepping new hardware, validating headroom, forecasting power/space) rather than reacting to emergencies.
Unified Governance and Compliance Uplift
Because providers can work across environments and maintain standard toolchains, they can introduce consistent policy enforcement, audit tracking, drift detection, and security posture monitoring. That coverage often reveals policy gaps or misconfigurations quickly, helping mitigate compliance risk in regulated industries.
Cost Stabilization and Avoidance
Moving from reactive support to proactive monitoring reduces the number of emergency callouts and lowers unexpected costs. Many organizations see the investment pay off within 6 to 18 months, largely through less downtime and fewer hours spent on manual recovery. Some colocation providers note that clients using managed services cut unplanned support events by 25 to 35 percent in the first year alone.
The speed of these outcomes depends on initial environment maturity, integration burden, and the depth of service adoption. But in nearly all cases, managed operations deliver measurable improvements well before a full infrastructure refresh or build-out would justify itself.
Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities
The same conditions that complicate infrastructure management can also create an opening for organizations to rethink how they operate. For many enterprises, handing off infrastructure management through colocation environment-based managed services turns chronic operational stress into an unexpected competitive advantage.
Regional banks and other mid-sized enterprises often find their IT teams tied up with low-value work. Uptime Institute’s 2024 Data Center Survey reports that 46 percent of operators cite staff shortages as their biggest challenge, especially in monitoring, patching, and incident response. When lean teams spend most of their time troubleshooting and maintaining systems, innovation slows. Projects such as AI-driven fraud detection or new customer analytics remain on hold because day-to-day operations consume all available capacity.
Handing these tasks to a managed services provider can really change the equation. Organizations gain access to skilled staff, automation platforms, and governance frameworks without the burden of expanding payroll. Resilience also improves: disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provides tested continuity, and IDC’s 2024 Managed Security Services report shows that 62 percent of enterprises using third-party providers detected and contained breaches faster than in-house teams. For industries like finance, healthcare, and government, shifting responsibility this way reduces compliance risk while freeing internal teams to deliver customer-facing initiatives.
Economic Implications
Managed services also change the economics of infrastructure. Gartner projects that by 2026, 70% of enterprises will rely on colocation providers offering managed services to reduce cost volatility and expand scalability. Rather than commit large capital outlays for equipment that may be obsolete within three years, enterprises can adopt predictable service models. This creates headroom in budgets, allowing CIOs to prioritize digital transformation initiatives over repetitive maintenance.
In other words, the very pressures that threaten to slow innovation, like operational complexity, rising costs, and skills shortages, can become catalysts for progress when re-channeled through managed services. Enterprises that embrace this model discover that they can both stabilize infrastructure and accelerate new initiatives at the same time.
Future-Ready Infrastructure With the Help of Colocation Managed Services
Enterprise IT will only grow more complex in the years ahead. Hybrid deployments, unpredictable AI workloads, supply chain volatility, and economic pressure are all raising the demands on infrastructure teams. Organizations that try to absorb these pressures with limited staff risk slowing down, as routine operations take priority over innovation.
Managed services in colocation environments offer a much-needed and practical alternative: they place infrastructure operations into a structured framework supported by skilled staff, automation, and clear SLAs. This approach frees enterprises to focus on strategic outcomes: building new products, advancing digital transformation, and improving customer experiences, all while specialists handle resilience and compliance.
Industry data reflects the shift: Uptime Institute reports that more than 80 percent of enterprises plan to increase their use of outsourced or co-managed infrastructure services within two years, citing predictable costs and access to talent as the main drivers. Consequently, managed services are becoming a central part of infrastructure strategy.
For enterprises exploring managed services, choosing the right provider is critical. Volico Data Centers offers managed services solutions that simplify daily operations while preserving transparency and flexibility. Its services span continuous monitoring, advanced cybersecurity, disaster recovery, backup, and compliance support, creating a foundation that allows organizations to grow without being weighed down by routine infrastructure work. With resilient facilities and a team of experienced specialists, Volico delivers operational depth while keeping clients in control of their environments.
Want to know more?
Contact us today to discover how Volico managed services can lift the burden of infrastructure management and maintenance from your organization’s team.
