A Managed Network refers to a turnkey service in which a data center provider or other IT vendor takes on the responsibilities of maintaining and monitoring the physical network, routers and switches of a customer’s entire network.

Managed networks are designed to help corporate clients mitigate the difficulties of managing their own network — allowing them to spend more time on activities that deliver value to their business. Advantages of managed networks include robust connectivity, cost savings, flexibility and scalability to support corporate growth and changing performance needs.

Managed network solutions offered by data centers may include:

• Virtual connectivity — providing workload mobility to respond to varying levels of demand via connectivity between data centers.
• Business continuity — leveraging multiple data centers with embedded connectivity to minimize downtime and ensure responsive application performance in the event that redirection is necessary

Disaster recovery — leveraging connectivity with other managed network data centers to support system, application or data restoration through data backup and storage in secondary locations