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Every organization that is steadily growing is bound to find itself at crossroads of deciding between establishing an in-house data center Services facility and outsourcing the infrastructure to cater to its growing IT requirements. There are many small and medium sized enterprises that have been able to save huge upfront investments or CAPEX by choosing Data Center Services Outsourcing over an on-site IT infrastructure.
In house data centers
It is natural for organizations that are on fast track of business to experience resource crunch with existing in-house facilities. Growing needs of data storage facilities can be combined with procuring additional resource intensive applications forcing organizations to look for avenues to either outsource these capabilities or build and manage own in-house infrastructure.
Infrastructure related requirements of every organization are different in terms of day-to-day management of IT operations or providing seamless support to run mission critical applications. The final decision to build in-house facilities for managing IT infrastructure largely depends on the individual organization’s ways to manage such critical issues and other factors including cloud adoption and virtualization needs.
In-house data center calls for considerable capital investment that includes cost of space and installation of fiber cables. In addition to this, the enterprise will have to make arrangements for expert technical manpower to ensure round-the-clock monitoring of the equipment, networking, and security of the facility. Then there are huge bandwidth costs, equipment costs, power bills, and costs related to cooling and other vital utilities.
Considering these factors, it is obvious that only large sized organizations with large scale storage and security concerns and long-term perspectives are able to afford the massive capital as well as operational costs of an in-house data center facility. In-house facilities offer unlimited access to resources and full-fledged control over all aspects of data centers. Such facilities can be expanded in future to make way for further infrastructure growth.
Brief overview of DCO
DCO or data center outsourcing is to allocate entire or part of day-to-day management of servers to data center service provider by entering into an annual or a long term agreement. Data center service providers ensure that all IT requirements of clients including running and maintaining of data center Services are fulfilled through professional and multiple support services.
Outsourcing of data center Services is primarily aimed at accessing resources that may not be internally available such as power, cooling, equipment, or space. DCO is also useful for organizations to reduce or control IT related costs and free up vital resources including technical workforce that can be channelized for accomplishing more important tasks.
Relevance of data enter outsourcing
IT infrastructure needs of small businesses can be extremely limited. These can be as small as few cabinets and a limited amount of storage space. It is quite obvious that such organization will have to outsource these resources because of considerable costs involved in building own data centers.
This may be extrapolated to medium sized organizations that need to be more flexible in terms of resource availability.
Variety of DCO options
One of the most striking advantages of data center outsourcing is availability of a plethora of options that can cater to all types of investment strategies that can be governed by budget, size, and location.
Organizations can choose colocation services by leasing only the space, power, bandwidth, and manpower from the data center services provider. This option allows organizations to own their equipment and have seamless access to the same.
Organizations can look forward to reduce their manpower expenditure by availing managed services that take care of all operations of data centers.
The most common type of outsourcing is to lease servicers and related services that can cover huge gamut of functions such as e-commerce, storage, emails, and databases.
Vital attributes of outsourcing IT services
Cost-effectiveness- The most obvious advantage of outsourcing IT services is the reduced TCO. Organizations can enjoy freedom of choosing from a wide spectrum of solutions without having to worry about additional manpower or infrastructure to support the same. SMEs can also select from the most affordable and proven service providers to optimize their IT infrastructure investment. There is no addition burden of managing staff, looking after regular upkeep, and to ensure round the clock monitoring of the facility.
Reliable uptime– Outsourced data center services are governed by Service Level Agreements. These are designed to assure adherence to specific standards of services including 99.99 percent network uptime. Service providers are also committed to ensure flawless security measures and 24×7 monitoring of all critical equipment.
Scalability and flexibility– Outsourced facility can be built and scaled rapidly. In contrast, it may take months to build in-house facilities. Data center service providers are able to provision additional resources or cabinets as per demand of the clients. These facilities can more efficiently handle growing requirements of organization than an in-house IT facility.
Reliability of support– Outsourced facilities are more flexible and agile in terms of handling fluctuating demands of clients. These are also constantly monitored by professional technicians for greater reliability of services.
Secure and carrier neutral facility– Outsourcing service providers with carrier neutral facilities offer seamless immunity against any carrier failure in addition to broad choice of selecting a preferred telecom service provider. Presence of state of the security mechanism such as biometric access controls continuous CCTV monitoring, and mantraps offer robust protection of vital networking equipment.
Takeaway
Small and medium sized enterprises should consider the option of outsourcing data center services. Even larger organization need to relook into the viability of in-house data centers due to rapidly changing IT landscape and limited life expectancy of data centers.
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