By: Zach Kazanski

The digital revolution is transforming infrastructure and service providers, inspiring massive shifts in enterprise organizations. In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the role of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) has evolved significantly. No longer are they mere commodity providers offering basic IT services; they have transitioned into strategic partners that deliver comprehensive, value-added solutions. This shift is particularly evident in industries such as healthcare, financial services, hospitality, and automotive, and impacts both large and small organizations.

Customer-focused providers are searching for ways to differentiate themselves to capitalize on growth opportunities and capture market share. This requires careful consideration of a company’s current service capabilities against anticipated future needs, driving innovation and M&A activity across the sector. There are many examples across the industry of strategic moves aimed at meeting the growing demands of modern enterprises.

Let’s consider modern-day IT Infrastructure. Flexible capabilities that allow companies control while benefiting from traditional colocation capabilities is a solution set that leverages bare metal servers. These servers have become an essential solution for businesses with demanding workloads and performance requirements. Bare metal servers provide dedicated resources without a hypervisor layer, resulting in superior performance compared to traditional virtual machines. This makes them ideal for tasks requiring high computing power, storage, and network performance. The enhanced reliability and consistent performance of bare metal servers make them a preferred choice for industries such as healthcare, financial services, and large-scale data processing.

But the real story is how service providers are becoming more than commodity brokers of pipes and hardware. The industry is looking for creative new ways to add that extra layer of value for dynamic use cases like automotive, finance, and healthcare.

Bare Metal Remains Relevant in Modern Computing

Bare metal servers remain highly relevant in modern computing, particularly for organizations with demanding workloads and specific performance requirements. They provide superior performance and reliability, allow for greater customization and control, directly support hybrid and edge computing, and offer cost-effective solutions for specialized workloads.

Benefits of bare metal solutions include access to dedicated physical resources without the overhead of virtualization. This results in superior performance, especially for applications that require high computing power, storage, or network throughput. Industries such as finance, healthcare, and big data analytics often rely on bare metal for tasks that demand consistent, high-performance computing. The absence of resource contention and hypervisor layer also lead to improved reliability and predictable performance.

With unparalleled flexibility across hardware configurations and software stacks, bare metal solutions offer organizations the ability to tailor their server environments to meet specific needs. The layers of flexibility include options to choose specialized processors to implement custom operating systems or security protocols. This level of control is particularly valuable for businesses with unique compliance requirements or those running legacy applications that may not be compatible with virtualized environments.

As cloud adoption grows, bare metal servers are finding new relevance in hybrid infrastructure setups. They can serve as high-performance nodes within a larger cloud ecosystem, handling resource-intensive tasks while integrating seamlessly with virtualized resources. Additionally, the rise of edge computing has created new use cases for bare metal, where low-latency, high-performance computing is required closer to data sources and end-users. While cloud computing offers flexibility and