Are You a Data Center Innovator or a Farmer?

In this this edition of “Voices of the Industry,” Gary Wojtaszek, President and CEO of CyrusOne, explains the benefits of the build-to-suit data center and being a data center innovator. 

Why Build-To-Suit Data Centers are Faster, Cheaper and More Efficient Investments than Building Private Data Centers

Like many farmers of the last century who resisted the move to larger, more productive farming methods, many business leaders cling to an old IT illusion that they still need to design, build and manage a private data center. Why is it that so many businesses have not yet evolved their thinking to align with new strategic opportunities of efficiently and effectively building a data center?

In today’s high-tech world, there’s no economic, strategic or rational reason to build your own data center.

Don’t be a Farmer

If your business is a fast-growing cloud provider, social media firm or enterprise company with a large IT footprint, you may believe private data centers are a necessity, but like farmer’s have discovered over the last century, it’s time to move out of old paradigms and into new modern operationally efficient methods. So, don’t be a farmer. Be a data center innovator.

Free Up Your Company’s Internal Resources to Focus on Your Core Business
Your internal resources are better spent developing new products, improving current products and optimizing the customer experience – in other words, doing things that drive profitability and competitiveness. Building a data center is a time-consuming task.

Free Up Your Capital for More Important, Business-Building Investments
Imagine that your company has to make a choice for next year’s budget. You can spend money to develop a new technology to drive revenue and profitability, or build a private data center.

The better use of budget is to drive business growth with the new technology, and avoid the heavy capital expenditure investment of a private data center. Spend that money on developing new product, improving your best-selling services or other activities that will grow your business, increase your company’s value and generate returns for your investors.

Obtain a Build-to-Suit Data Center Faster and at a Lower Cost Than if You Build it Yourself
Building a private data center takes 12 to 18 months, or longer. By contrast, some data center providers can deliver a custom, build-to-suit data center in just three to six months. This ensures you have enough IT capacity to support your growing infrastructure demands.

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“Time is money,” as they say, and with any kind of construction, time saved is money saved. The quicker you can complete a construction project, the less you pay in hourly labor rates and equipment rentals. Data center providers use standardized practices and streamlined construction techniques that enable them to complete build-to-suit projects much faster, which reduces construction costs. Since it costs less for the data center provider to build and operate build-to-suit facilities, it also costs less for customers to lease them.

Rapidly Scale Up as Needed and Eliminate the Risk of Overbuilding
One of the biggest risks you face when your company builds a private data center is the risk of overbuilding. Companies will usually build a larger facility, with extra space, power and cooling to support future IT expansions, but once the data center is finished, it may take several years to fill it up with IT equipment. During those years, you’re operating an underutilized asset that’s not generating the promised return on investment.

With modular power and cooling offered by data center providers, you can rapidly scale up to meet your company’s growing IT footprint. If you need an increase in power density, the provider can bring in additional power and cooling units and connect them to your facility with no impact on your current IT environment. What’s more, you don’t pay for additional power and cooling until you need it.

Control Security and Maintenance

Once a build-to-suit data center project is completed, the internal operations are turned over to you, where you can then hire your own security and internal maintenance staff to take care of your IT footprint within the data center.

This ensures you meet all your security requirements and keep control over your IT footprint. In addition, you can take responsibility over operational and maintenance aspects of the building and interior spaces.

After examining the internal resources needed, capital costs, time-to-completion, required expertise and security and operational costs, it’s clear why it’s so important for companies to trust data center providers for their IT infrastructure needs. Read more about why it doesn’t make sense to build your own data center and how to be a data center innovator in my executive report, “Yes, You’d Have to Be Crazy to Build Your Own Data Center.”

Gary Wojtaszek is the President and CEO of CyrusOne,  which is a high growth data center company that focuses on serving the needs of the Fortune 1000. 

CyrusOne is a high-growth real estate investment trust (REIT) specializing in highly reliable enterprise-class, carrier-neutral data center properties. The company provides mission-critical data center facilities that protect and ensure the continued operation of IT infrastructure for more than 950 customers, including more than 180 of the Fortune 1000.