There are a number of triggers such as business growth and office relocation which may cause an organisation to evaluate the adequacy of their current data centre. The decision of whether to outsource a datacentre as opposed maintaining one in-house can depend on a number of factors. For organisations with only one location a secondary data centre for remote backup, offsite backup storage or disaster recovery purposes will need to be considered.
The way a business operates should be considered, as an outsourced datacentre will work well for organisations where operational expenditure is preferred. If you’re already using cloud storage, online data backup, email archiving or outsourced disaster recovery services this strategy will be complimentary. Building/Upgrading and maintaining a datacentre will require significant up front capital expenditure to achieve the same result as a commercial datacentre provider. As commercial datacentre’s deal in 1000’s or square meters of technical floor space there are a lot of savings to be made with that quantity of scale.
An outsourced data centre generally will give better resiliency as most commercial providers have at least N+1 redundancy on power and cooling systems coupled with better physical security. The importance of the level of resilience needed for primary infrastructure will depend on the maturity of your organisations data backup, IT disaster recovery and business continuity processes.
Aspects such as expandability of technical floor space, floor loading, fire suppression and the availability and redundancy of power and cooling infrastructure all need to be considered carefully when assessing the suitability of a datacentre solution.
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