THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Pierre Marais
Acting MD: Cybernest

We are witnessing a massive proliferation of data centre (DC) requirements in the market today.

Much of the current computing footprint is still based on legacy architectures that indivisibly bind computing services (storage, processing and so forth) to the underlying physical infrastructure.

Most often, this results in servers being significantly under-utilised, leaving an enormous and unnecessary dent in enterprise budgets and a lasting imprint on the environment.

What makes it worse is that stable data centre infrastructure is very often critical to the success of the enterprise but not core to the business, or does not add any differentiation to the business. Therefore, business today continuously needs to weigh up costs versus risk in their decisions concerning the delivery of IT solutions to the enterprise.

In part, the culture of ownership continues to frustrate progress, but we can also blame the ICT industry for failing to come up with a realistic outsourced data centre proposition. However, the tables have now finally been turned, thanks to the coming of age of a relatively new class of converged service provider, with capabilities and economies of scale in telecoms as well as data networking.

The converged IT service arena is being contested by companies with traditional data networking skills on the one side, and on the other, by companies with traditional telecoms expertise. In our opinion, telcos have the better value proposition. For one thing, they own the core and access networks, offering a single point of contact for service requests and a basis for seamless integration of computing infrastructure.

Furthermore, telcos’ significant experience and skill in managing complex infrastructure plays a role. Furthermore, many telcos have made significant investments in hosting deployments, with the added advantage of scale, while the opposite cannot be said for IT integrators. Non-operators still utilise the telco backbone in many instances, which introduces complexity and extra steps when provisioning a service or processing a request.

In a time of economic strife, all enterprises are under pressure to cut costs. The cost pressure is even greater when coupled with the worldwide drive to implement energy-saving green data centres. The cost of establishing a reliable hosting environment simply becomes prohibitive when it does not differentiate a company in terms of market positioning.

It makes infinitely more sense to leave data centres to service providers that are heavily invested in network infrastructure, server platforms and skills in hosted or managed infrastructure and services. The latest outsourced data centre deployments feature flexible provisioning techniques such as virtualisation, and efficiency-boosting tactics such as server consolidation, making ‘greening’ a much more easily achieved proposition that it would have been, if the enterprise were to go it alone.

The only real decisions left to make in these circumstances centre on which part of your computing infrastructure you should outsource, and which provider to choose. It is important to make a strategic decision. How close is ownership of server infrastructure to your ability to conduct your core business? And how credible is the track record, infrastructural base and managed service history of your provider? The answers to these questions will lead to an informed decision on one of the most pressing issues for your IT organisation, now and into the future.