INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Cloud, on-premise
or vendor-neutral –
which data centre is
right for you?
As business requirements have evolved, so too
have data centre offerings. As Eckart Zollner,
Head of Business Development, the Jasco Group,
discusses, evaluating and choosing the right
option for your organisation allows you to gain
considerable advantage.
D
ata centres act as the data and
app stores of businesses, they
provide raw computing power
and connectivity. As such, they are core
to any business. Ownership is, however,
no longer essential. Businesses now
make strategic, often hybrid, choices
based on their business and security
requirements, and what their customers
need. There are essentially three kinds
of data centres:
• A vendor-neutral data centre is owned
and managed by a third party data
centre company. This company will
not offer any services other than data
centre space and always-available
power, cooling and security. Clients pay
a monthly rental for rack space and
power, and bring their own equipment
that they manage themselves.
• An on-premise data centre is owned
by a firm, solely for the data centre
requirements of the said firm. No third
party provider selling services for the
data centre will be allowed into the
on-premises data centre.
• Data centres in the cloud offer
virtualised compute service layers
(Infrastructure as a Service or
IaaS) or even application based
(Platform as a Service or PaaS). They
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are generally owned by a single
services company, such as Amazon
or Microsoft (Azure), and allow their
customers to request virtualised
compute and storage resources in
order to host their own applications.
Each type of data centre has
its advantages
An on-premise data centre enables
firms to maintain total control,
enforce their own security and remain
as flexible as their own business
requirements require. Critical data such
as government data or financial data,
which has a requirement for maximum
protection against loss or theft, remain
in on-premise-based data centres.
There is a growing market for vendor-
neutral and cloud-based data centre
services, however, especially as these
offerings evolve and mature.
The evolution of vendor-neutral
data centres
Service providers, financial institutions
and large enterprises are the kinds of
users that may benefit from a vendor-
neutral data centre. Vendor-neutral
“Businesses now
make strategic,
often hybrid,
choices based on
their business
and security
requirements,
and what their
customers need.”
data centres create large IP services
communities and thus act as a global
telecommunications and services hub.
They create an ecosystem of competing
service providers that offers clients
maximum choice and lowest possible
price options for IT services. Telecoms
providers now offering over the top and
other services are also now making use
of vendor-neutral data centres rather
than own their own infrastructure
– its less costly and often increases
accessibility to their end customers.
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