There is no doubt, and
CIO would agree, that data centres today are the most expensive real estate components of real estate. In addition, the presence of servers result in the consumption of vast amounts of electricity and require even more power to run the cooling systems to keep the data centre and its equipment from overheating. Research suggests that 60 percent of the power used in the data centre is used for cooling.
Many data centre service provider believe that outsourcing of operations can make costs predictable for enterprises.
The biggest benefit of outsourcing data centre operations is lesser total cost of ownership. By outsourcing to MSPs, enterprises don"t have to spend more money on deploying the necessary IT infrastructure, hiring skilled manpower and spending on requirements like power and air conditioning. For example, with some cloud computing services; companies are able to cut costs by at least 20-25 percent. This is a significant amount for companies which can budget the same for other purposes.
Moreover, data centres have IT and non-IT components and it requires domain knowledge in various areas like electrical, mechanical, air-conditioning, fire fighting, networking, systems and security. The knowledge in all these areas may not be feasible for many enterprises to acquire and maintain in a cost effective manner.
Also, as part of service delivery or Service Level Agreements (SLAs), stringent monitoring and management mechanism is put in place. Right reports can be extracted from the tools which could help enterprises to know the input capacity of their infrastructure. Capacity reports and analysis could help to predict budget in majority of the cases.
Enterprise demands
Traditionally, firms chose to outsource their data centre activities for cost reduction purposes. Today, as enterprises look at IT to provide a competitive advantage,
CIO have shifted their outsourcing drivers to select service providers with strategic enablement through IT capabilities (people, processes and equipment). Investment focus has moved toward choices that will move the business closer to its suppliers and customers and shift IT focus from tactical duties to strategic contributions. "While selecting a partner, it is extremely important to figure out whether data centre hosting is their core business and there is enough resource and planning gone in building the same up for high availability. It is important to know whether their setup is future-proof with ease of adaptability to new technologies,"says Rajesh Nair, CIO, Maersk. "It is also imperative for providers to have tie-ups with vendors/partners for technology support to meet all kind of business needs through easy integrations,"he adds.
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