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IT infrastructure managed services

0 MIN READ • PubNub Labs Team on Jun 15, 2025

IT Infrastructure Managed Services involve outsourcing the setup, monitoring, and maintenance of core tech systems—like servers, networks, storage, and OS layers—to a specialized provider. These services ensure uptime, security, scalability, and compliance without needing a large in-house ops team.

Why It Matters to Dev Teams

Remote DevOps/SRE team can handle:

Server provisioning & patching
Network/security configuration
24/7 monitoring and incident response
Backups, scaling, and performance tuning

You get clean APIs (SDK), dashboards, and automation hooks while focusing on app code and business logic.

Benefits of Outsourcing IT Infrastructure

Outsourcing infrastructure management is not merely a cost-cutting exercise—it is a strategic lever for engineering leaders to increase velocity, resilience, and technical breadth. When approached deliberately, it frees senior engineers from operational toil and re-centers focus on architectural excellence, automation, and business impact.

1. Cost Savings Without Compromising Performance

Outsourcing infrastructure management significantly reduces both CapEx and OpEx:

Reduced hardware costs: Managed service providers (MSPs) often use shared infrastructure or cloud-native platforms, lowering the total cost of ownership.
Labor efficiency: Instead of maintaining a large in-house team 24/7, outsourcing shifts labor costs to a variable model, with predictable monthly expenses.
Minimized downtime: Proactive monitoring and incident response reduce outages and the costs associated with unplanned downtime—often invisible but substantial.

For senior teams managing budget allocations, this means greater financial flexibility for innovation and core development efforts.

2. Scalability with Demand and Growth

Modern infrastructure demands elasticity. Outsourcing allows:

Dynamic resource provisioning to scale up or down based on workloads without the delays of hardware procurement or internal provisioning cycles.
Rapid global expansion through providers with distributed data centers, making it easier to deploy applications closer to end users.
Multi-cloud and hybrid support, giving engineering teams optionality in deploying workloads in optimal environments.

Scalability shifts from a constraint to a competitive advantage.

3. Access to Specialized Expertise

Infrastructure ecosystems—spanning Kubernetes, security, compliance, CI/CD, networking, and more—require deep, ever-evolving expertise.

MSPs provide certified professionals across key disciplines (e.g., SREs, cloud architects, security engineers).
Teams can offload maintenance and patching while focusing on architecture, automation, and value-driven improvements.
Enhanced security posture through dedicated experts implementing best practices, continuous audits, and rapid vulnerability response.

Outsourcing transforms niche skill gaps into consistent capabilities.

4. Operational Efficiency and Focus on Core Objectives

Outsourcing redefines team velocity and effectiveness:

24/7 monitoring, SLAs, and incident response eliminate the need for internal on-call rotations for basic infra issues.
Faster incident recovery using automated workflows and predefined runbooks maintained by MSPs.
Tooling and observability layers are often bundled, accelerating DevOps workflows and MTTR.

This allows senior engineers to focus on product engineering, infrastructure as code, and strategic innovation instead of backend firefighting.

Core components

1. Servers

Servers form the backbone of IT infrastructure, providing compute resources to run applications, databases, and services. In a managed context, these are typically monitored, patched, and secured proactively by an MSP (Managed Service Provider) or internal automation system.

Technical Considerations

OS Management: Lifecycle automation (provisioning, patching, decommissioning) for both Linux (e.g., RHEL, Ubuntu) and Windows servers.
Performance Metrics: CPU, memory, IOPS, and thread utilization are monitored for anomalies.
High Availability (HA): Implemented using clusters (e.g., Pacemaker/Corosync) or virtualization redundancy (e.g., VMware HA, Proxmox clusters).
Automation: Tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Terraform manage configurations and scaling.

Where PubNub Applies

PubNub can facilitate real-time alerting and control messaging for server health dashboards. For example, server agents can publish status events (CPU threshold breach, disk failures) to PubNub channels, which admins subscribe to via a web or mobile dashboard.

2. Storage

Managed storage includes persistent block storage, object storage, and distributed file systems. Its management ensures data integrity, scalability, and redundancy.

Technical Considerations

SAN/NAS: Fibre Channel or iSCSI protocols for block storage; SMB/NFS for shared NAS.
Object Storage: Solutions like Amazon S3 or on-prem Ceph for cloud-native architectures.
RAID/ZFS: Ensures redundancy and integrity.
Snapshots/Backups: Automated snapshot policies and incremental backups to cloud.
Tiering: Hot/warm/cold storage stratification based on access frequency.

Where PubNub Applies

PubNub can be used to stream file operation logs or access events in real time for auditing or SIEM integration. E.g., a service that publishes file access alerts (especially in sensitive folders) to a monitoring dashboard using PubNub.

3. Networking

Networking components (physical and virtual) ensure connectivity, segmentation, and traffic optimization across the infrastructure. Management includes performance tuning, security, and fault tolerance.

Technical Considerations

Core Components: Firewalls, routers, switches (L2/L3), load balancers (F5, HAProxy).
Segmentation: VLANs, VXLANs, and SDN (Software Defined Networking) for isolation.
Security: ACLs, IDS/IPS (e.g., Suricata, Snort), and zero-trust architectures.
Monitoring: SNMP traps, NetFlow, and packet inspection for real-time telemetry.
Automation: NetDevOps practices using tools like NetBox, Nornir, or Ansible.

Where PubNub Applies

PubNub enables real-time updates for network topology dashboards, for instance, displaying alerts like link flaps or BGP route changes. PubNub's low-latency publish/subscribe pattern suits rapid alerting in NOC dashboards or even in browser-based topology viewers.

4. Virtualization

Virtualization abstracts compute, network, and storage resources, improving resource efficiency and enabling easier scaling and disaster recovery.

Technical Considerations

Hypervisors: KVM, ESXi, Hyper-V.
Management: Platforms like vCenter, OpenStack, or Proxmox VE.
Templates & Cloning: For rapid VM provisioning with base OS/images.
Snapshots and Live Migration: For fault-tolerance and upgrade scenarios.
Resource Pools: Shared CPU/memory pools for controlled allocation. Resource pools allow IT teams to optimize software and isolate computing resources among different workloads or tenants, helping mitigate “noisy neighbor” effects and ensure consistent performance.

Where PubNub Applies

Real-time VM lifecycle events (e.g., VM Started, Snapshot Taken, Migration Failed) can be published via PubNub channels to systems or admin consoles. This allows sysadmins to monitor and control infrastructure reactively or through bot interactions.

5. Cloud Infrastructure

Managed cloud infrastructure extends traditional on-prem IT via public, private, or hybrid cloud services, usually governed through automation, security policies, and cost management practices.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vs. Managed Services

As cloud adoption continues to mature, engineering leaders are often faced with the decision between using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or leveraging Managed Service Providers (MSPs)—or finding the right blend of both.

Defining the Models

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides on-demand access to computing infrastructure—servers, storage, and networking—hosted by cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It offers:

Full control over VMs, OS, middleware, and runtime.
High elasticity, ideal for dynamic workloads.
DevOps-first design, enabling automation via APIs and IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi).

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) operate at a higher level of abstraction. They offer:

End-to-end management of IT infrastructure or applications.
SLA-backed support, monitoring, backups, and incident resolution.
Domain-specific expertise, often including compliance and security hardening.

Integration Patterns: Combining IaaS and MSPs

Many enterprises now use a hybrid model, leveraging the flexibility of IaaS alongside the operational simplicity of managed services.

Common integration patterns include:

1. Managed Services on Top of IaaS

Example: Use AWS EC2 for compute and partner with a managed service provider to handle patching, observability, and DR planning.
Tooling: CloudWatch + MSP’s custom dashboards

2. IaaS as the Foundation for Multi-Tenant SaaS

Example: Run a SaaS platform on GCP IaaS but outsource tenant provisioning and support to an MSP.

3. Cloud-Native Managed Services with IaaS for Custom Workloads

Example: Rely on Azure App Services for APIs and use VM-based IaaS to handle high-performance workloads like AI inference.

4. MSPs for Compliance, IaaS for DevOps Speed

Use MSPs for regulated workloads (e.g., HIPAA, SOC2) and deploy rapid innovation projects using IaaS under a “shadow IT” model with policy guardrails.

Strategic Considerations

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

IaaS gives you architectural freedom but demands internal skills to control costs.
MSPs reduce the need for deep ops teams but may lock you into expensive service contracts.

Operational Risk

IaaS places SLAs on infrastructure, not uptime. You own reliability.
MSPs may guarantee uptime but limit observability and incident triage customization.

Innovation Velocity

DevOps-centric teams thrive on IaaS platforms with CI/CD, feature flags, and custom telemetry.
MSPs can be slow to adapt to fast-moving tech stacks (e.g., K8s, service mesh, serverless).

PubNub plays a complementary role in this landscape by providing live messaging infrastructure that seamlessly integrates with both IaaS platforms and managed service environments. Supporting use cases such as live collaboration, device control, and system observability across distributed systems, without the operational overhead typically associated with custom real-time backends.

Managed Network Services and Connectivity

In today’s hyperconnected digital landscape, enterprises depend on resilient and agile networks to support cloud workloads, remote teams, and real-time applications. Managed Network Services encompass the proactive oversight and enhancement of WAN (Wide Area Networks), LAN (Local Area Networks), and SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) infrastructures, offering organizations a way to simplify network complexity while ensuring optimal performance, availability, and security.

Key Capabilities of Managed Network Services

24/7 Monitoring and Incident Response Network operations centers (NOCs) continuously track performance metrics, device statuses, and traffic patterns to detect anomalies and resolve issues before they impact end users.
Automated Traffic Optimization Through dynamic path selection and bandwidth allocation, SD-WAN solutions ensure that critical applications (like VoIP or video conferencing) are prioritized and delivered with low latency and jitter.
Security and Threat Detection Integrated firewalling, encryption, and anomaly detection protect against cyber threats, with unified visibility across branch offices and data centers.
Predictive Maintenance and Insights AI/ML models identify usage trends, forecast potential failures, and recommend configuration changes to enhance reliability and reduce costs.

Example Solutions

Real-Time Alerting and Control with PubNub powering live monitoring dashboards and alerting systems that instantly notify teams of packet loss, throughput drops, or routing issues. Admins can remotely execute network reconfigurations through secure, low-latency PubNub channels.
SD-WAN Dynamic Routing Using business intent overlays, managed SD-WANs dynamically reroute traffic based on application type, destination, and performance metrics. For example, video streaming traffic is routed via low-latency links while bulk backups use cost-effective paths.
LAN Optimization with Intelligent Switching Managed LAN services utilize intelligent switches and controllers to automatically balance load, isolate faults, and segment traffic for security and efficiency.
Edge-to-Cloud Visibility Platforms Combined with PubNub’s real-time messaging, visibility platforms offer a unified view of network behavior, from edge devices to cloud-hosted services, enhancing troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.

Optimization Models in Practice

Policy-Based QoS (Quality of Service) Set and enforce QoS rules that adapt in real time based on bandwidth consumption and app priority.
Anomaly Detection with Machine Learning Continuously trained models spot outliers in throughput, latency, or traffic origin, enabling preemptive actions.
Capacity Planning Algorithms Usage forecasting models guide bandwidth upgrades and hardware deployments, reducing bottlenecks during traffic surges.
Feedback Loops via PubNub APIs Use PubNub’s APIs to feed real-time user experience data (e.g., latency spikes or dropped packets) back into optimization engines for continuous improvement.

Automation and Observability in MSP Services

Modern managed service providers (MSPs) now cater to developers by exposing automation and observability through API-first designs, real-time monitoring, and CI/CD integration. This is especially critical for teams using real-time platforms like PubNub, where visibility and control over infrastructure directly impact application performance.

API-First Control

Rather than relying solely on dashboards, forward-thinking MSPs offer programmatic interfaces for provisioning, scaling, monitoring, and remediation. This allows developers to automate tasks and integrate infrastructure controls directly into their tooling. For PubNub users, this means the ability to spin up regional nodes or auto-scale message-processing infrastructure based on live usage—without manual intervention.

Observability and Alerting

Effective MSPs provide customizable observability with live metrics, logs, and traces, often built on standards like Prometheus or OpenTelemetry. Alerts can be defined programmatically and routed to systems like Slack or PagerDuty. For PubNub-based services, this enables proactive response to issues like latency spikes, message delivery failures, or regional traffic anomalies—potentially even pushing alerts through PubNub itself for real-time team visibility.

CI/CD and GitOps Integration

MSPs increasingly support infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflows. CI/CD pipelines can deploy not just app logic, but infrastructure and observability rules. Developers can automate gating of deployments based on real-time performance data—useful for PubNub SDK rollouts or feature toggles driven by stream health metrics.

Extensibility and Custom Logic

The best MSPs expose SDKs and scripting options for deeper control. Developers can extend platform behavior with custom scaling rules or routing logic triggered by telemetry data. In PubNub-heavy environments, this enables responsive backends that adapt dynamically to traffic patterns.

Unified Dashboards

While APIs power automation, visual dashboards remain critical for live ops. Developer-friendly MSPs offer drill-down tools to trace metrics to root causes, often with embeddable or deep-linked views. For real-time pipelines powered by PubNub, this provides clear visibility into message flow, error trends, and system health—all in context.