Ideal Server Scenario For Hosting Online Courses

Currently, our company is in the process of upgrading our LMS system.  We are on a very old version of Plateau (5.8) and upgrading to the latest version of SuccessFactors Learning (SuccessFactors purchased Plateau).  During the upgrade process, I am pushing really hard on figuring out a different solution than we have on hosting our online courses.  When the LMS was implemented in 2007, before I was employed, IT provided an internal file server space to house our online courses.  We point our hosted LMS to the course files sitting on the internal file server.  This has caused NUMEROUS headaches such as not being able to use SCORM and publishing everything in AICC HACP, course connection issues causing the failure of completion on the user's learning history, slow course playback and errors for the end user and absolutely no way to offer online courses to our international employees.  We sometimes even have issues with users on VPN trying to take courses who are sitting in the very same city this server is housed!  Since I have been employed at my company, I have been LOUDLY protesting this solution and begging for an external solution with globally distributed, load balancing, multiple data centers.  I feel that this upgrade is the time to get this right.  I also have HUGE issues with our IT department not understanding the type of technology we need to really offer our employees a good experience when taking courses on our system.   

We could use iContent that is a service with SuccessFactors; however, the turnaround time to have a course up is lengthy and there are many times I am asked to get a course loaded and assigned to users within a very short time frame.  I would like to have more control over the course uploading process than iContent allows.  

So, to wrap this up, I am wondering how other businesses solve for this and if this community has any suggestions on a solution that could work for us.