Applications run in a network-hosted environment, serving a dispersed customer base.
However, the large business segment also is showing interest, and in the lower part of the spectrum, home-based businesses may quickly become one of the key segments benefiting from this model. There are many reasons why the ASP service model is quite compelling. The lowest layer provides infrastructure such as data center facilities, physical connectivity and data networking equipment, including routers and firewalls. This layer is responsible for maintaining expected levels of network performance, reliability and security. The next layer provides the ASP platform and includes application-specific infrastructure, computing resources such as servers and operating systems, data storage resources and application management.