CIO opinion
Security and resilience
The data centre is the beating heart of an
organisation. With Digital Transformation
high on the global agenda, operational
structures are becoming increasingly
entangled with technology, exacerbating the
impact data centre issues can have on both
productivity and profits. Data centres need to
be resilient when IT failures inevitably occur,
adding another layer of cost to IT budgets.
Increasingly complex networks of
dependencies are driving up the cost of
prevention and resilience – the two pillars
of effective business continuity strategy.
As a result, organisations are looking to
consolidate their rising cost by moving
mission-critical infrastructure to the
sanctuary of the colocated data centre
facility. Thanks to the multiple layers of
redundancies built into these facilities, single
points of failure can be prevented from
bringing the whole network down, ensuring
service levels remain in a constant state of
high availability.
There are more pragmatic reasons why
organisations choose to host their IT
workloads away from their base locations.
Circuit boards, transistors and other circuit
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components not only produce a lot of
waste heat that needs to be controlled in
a sustainable way, but are also susceptible
to both malfunction and failure if the
environmental conditions in the data
centre are not at the right levels. If the air
is too humid, water may begin to condense
on internal components; if the air is too
dry, ancillary humidification systems are
required to avoid static electricity discharge
problems. Organisations are looking to
colocating physical IT infrastructure in
facilities offering intelligent environmental
control systems, such as Building
Monitoring Systems (BMS), smart cooling
systems and independent alarms for heat
and smoke.
A cost-benefit analysis of data
centre colocation
Whether it is instilling IT infrastructure
with the resilience required to keep up with
today’s technology-defined operational
structures, or finding the right skilled
workers to maintain them, the advantage
of colocated over on-premises data centres
are clear from the perspective of cost
benefit. Colocation data centres provide a
predictable and scalable cost structure, so
an organisation only pays for what it uses,
meaning it has access to as little or as much
space, power and cooling as necessary.
Public cloud has also gained huge momentum
as an alternative to a traditional colocation
approach. Its speed and agility can be
incredibly well suited for a great deal of the
workloads being used today. Across our own
business we have replicated our European
data centre into the public cloud which has
given us incredibly fast recovery times.
As the adoption of cloud-based data centres
continues on the predicted trajectory, it is
worth mentioning that not all workloads
will be suitable for a cloud approach and
organisations should be careful before
investing in a virtualised service, it is vital
to seek the correct support and advice
before pushing everything to the cloud.
Organisations need to make best use
of the investments they have already
made in their infrastructure and have a
clear understanding of their needs before
committing to IT change programmes.
Many CIOs I speak with are looking for
opportunities to significantly reduce their
data centre estate and critically assessing a
move to colocation in some form or another.
It is simply a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’. n
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