Building Vs Outsourcing your Data Center

Author: Fred Mapp

This white paper presents a detailed description of best practices for you to consider in developing your organization’s data center strategic plan.





It includes:





- surveys of your peers on data center issues





- information about how to manage growth, business continuity and costs





- tactics for determining your core competencies related to data center management





- strategies for leveraging data center outsourcing to maximize your return on investment





Summary:





A majority of IT organizations, who are faced with the fast pace growth of their businesses and keeping up by providing “state of the art” applications and technology within the data center, find that building and maintaining the data center is a full time job.





Unfortunately data centers are increasingly limited in capacity, and building out new capacity is often cost-prohibitive for many companies.





The Business Proclamation:





Building and operating a Data Center is purely an outsourcing project, especially given the amount of resources involved that relate to real estate, power and cooling. Why? Because chief information officers (CIOs) have more strategic, higher value work on which to focus.





The Background:





Outsourcing all or portions of the data center is emerging as a very important strategic lever available to today’s CIOs and COOs to address growth. Data center outsourcing can genuinely help overcome many of the cost pressures faced in these tough times, as well as help to implement critical information technology initiatives cost effectively despite IT budget freezes.





The Association for Data Center Managers (AFCOM), an organization that provides education and resources for data center professionals, predicts big changes looming for data center managers, based on the results of a recent member survey. If their forecasts come to pass, data center managers will face some serious challenges in the years ahead: Power failures, service disruptions and a shrinking talent pool of technical staff are some of the key predictions AFCOM made based on recent member survey responses.





Here’s a summary of the survey findings that are expected to have a major impact on future data center operations:





1. By 2015, the talent pool of qualified senior level technical and management data center professionals will shrink by 45%.





2. By 2010, more than half of all data centers will have to relocate to new facilities or outsource some applications.





3. Over the next five years power failures and limits on power availability will halt data center operations at more than 90% of all companies.





4. By 2010, nearly 70% of all data centers will utilize some form of grid computing or other virtual processing.





5. Within the next five years, one out of every four data centers will experience a business disruption serious enough to affect the entire company’s ability to continue business-as-usual.





So what can be done?





What are world-class data centers doing to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively than their peers? This white paper presents a description of best practices for you to consider in developing your data center strategic plan.





As an example, understanding the critical business challenges is the first step in developing the data center strategy. Included in this data center whitepaper are surveys of your peers on data center issues, and topics about how to manage growth and business continuity, as well as how to manage costs and determine core competencies.





Soon it will not be justifiable for businesses to manage their own data center, because the price of outsourced data center services will be too attractive to ignore.





You need to consider letting data center outsourcing experts incorporate best practices and process improvements that can achieve true economies of scale.





This data center report was written by leading CIO, Fred Mapp, and is sponsored by i/o Data Centers. To download a free copy of this data center management report, please visit: http://www.iodatacenters.com/build-vs-outsource-whitepaper.htm?cpao=115


&s_cid=AS141

About the Author:

Fred Mapp served as CIO at various Fortune 100 companies and is presently a consultant and motivational speaker with more than 40 years of experience in IT. He has held key positions at IBM, InfoSpan Corporation, American Express, Honeywell, AMD and the World Congress on Information Technology. His book, Mapping Information Technology to Your Business, was published by Groundbreaking Press.To find another Related Article "click here"

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