Digital transformation demands that organizations of all sizes focus less on the daily operations of maintaining IT infrastructure and more on the strategic role technology plays in differentiating the business in a competitive market place. While it’s tempting to build out your infrastructure as you grow, a managed data centre makes more economic sense.

It’s tempting as a growing organization to add to your IT infrastructure, but in the long term a managed data centre is better bang for your buck. More importantly, it enables you to think more strategically about the role of technology in your digital transformation.

In fact, large Canadian enterprises are getting out the data centre business, according to IDC Canada.The State of the Canadian Data Centres, 2016 report found that leading companies in banking, transportation and retail have put the kibosh on building new data centres. It’s a global trend, in fact, as workloads have shifted from aging corporate data centres to third-party facilities over the past five years.

If running their own data centre doesn’t make sense for the big guys, small to mid-sized organizations should rethink their data centre strategy too.

You can’t get economies of Scale

In the case of data centres, bigger is better from a financial perspective, but most organizations can’t justify a big enough footprint – they don’t have the economies of scale on their own.

Realistically, at least 250,000 square feet or more of data centre space is necessary to get the necessary return on investment. This is achievable for a large enterprise, and more so a colocation facility, but not realistic for a small to mid-sized enterprise. And while IT staff often want ownership over their servers, they don’t have access to the bigger picture of what it is costing the company to run its data centre, including all the costs.

It’s hard to keep up with evolving Hardware and Networking

Advancements in networking, compute and storage are moving at a rapid pace, and keeping up with hardware refresh cycles requires a lot of time, money and expertise.

The evolution of enterprise storage is an excellent example: in less than five years, all-flash arrays have rapidly dropped in price to become an affordable option for primary storage, even for smaller enterprises. Meanwhile, software-defined networking (SDN) is well-suited to meet the dynamic scalability requirements of modern data centers and can reduce costs by leveraging commodity networking gear. However, it also requires a high level of expertise.

Figuring out what your networking, compute and storage needs are based your applications and data is time consuming. Add to the fact these three core elements of your infrastructure rarely have refresh cycles that are in sync, and keeping up with developments becomes a full-time job.

It’s resource Intensive

One of the main reasons large Canadian enterprises are shuttering their aging data centres is the capacity required to run a digital business today requires a great deal of power – it accounts for 70% to 80% of the overall cost of running the facility.

Managing all the physical aspects of a server and equipment room takes a lot of time and resources. Running your own data centre means you inevitably need to expand your IT team with specific expertise devoted to its management and upkeep.

Even if you do decide to maintain on-premise infrastructure, it doesn’t make sense to run it yourself. Consider finding a technology partner with the facilities management experience to take on the day-to-day maintenance and supervision it needs.

A company that’s already in the colocation business can easily take on tasks they are already doing in their own data centres, including:

• Monitoring of hardware, networking and environmental equipment
• Setting up new infrastructure and documenting infrastructure already in place
• Cable and racking management
• Setting up and managing access control
• Audits, update and change management as required
• Identify opportunities for better energy efficiency and green IT
• Vendor management, including facilities and HVAC

Digital transformation demands that organizations of all sizes focus less on the daily operations of maintaining IT infrastructure and more on the strategic role technology plays in differentiating the business in a competitive market place. While it’s tempting to build out your infrastructure as you grow, a managed data centre makes more economic sense.