Data Center Management for the World’s Critical Infrastructure

This is the third entry in a Data Center Frontier series that explores how data center management for critical infrastructure is evolving. This series, compiled in a special report, also explores design and operations for mission-critical data centers. 

Download the full report.

Your IT infrastructure is constantly evolving, from traditional on-premises to new, hybrid environments including virtualized and cloud. Leveraging your IT investments is more complicated than ever before. How do you integrate legacy systems with advanced —critical—data center solutions to maximize scalability, performance and availability? Do you have the in-house resources to monitor, diagnose and quickly resolve potential threats that could seriously impact your mission-critical workloads?

Critical environment resiliency requires an investment and maintenance. Don’t oversubscribe, but always plan for what you need. — Stewart Collier, Stream

There is a solid chance that your IT organization is not entirely prepared to properly manage and maintain your complex networks. We mentioned this earlier, but only 27% of companies received a passing grade for disaster readiness, according to a survey by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council.

This means that you’re going to need a flexible partner experienced in delivering expert business resiliency services; one that will transform your infrastructure and enable you to keep pace with changing business demands, while reducing overall costs.

Most of all, for your critical environments, this data center partner must be able to provide advanced facilities management, operational control, managed services, and a team which can specifically help you design around resiliency.

When it comes to resiliency and managing critical environments, many organizations still face challenges around design and deployment. “It’s not ignorance, it’s denial,” states Stewart Collier, Managing Director of Critical Environments at Stream Data Centers. “They’ve passed that responsibility to other people and said it’ll never happen to us. Critical environment resiliency requires an investment and maintenance. Don’t oversubscribe, but always plan for what you need.”

To get to those resiliency operational requirements, Stream Data Center’s Critical Environments Services deliver mission-critical operations and services for a wide range operational use-cases. Stream helps align IT-driven needs around buildings, which includes everything from multi-tenant carrier hotels to free standing Tier IV data centers.

Great Operations Teams Make ALL the Difference

Core teams of highly trained technicians expertly provide operational services across a combined portfolio of Stream-owned, as well as client-owned facilities. Remember, this is the team that helps support, defend, and operate the mission of the IT infrastructure. Most of all, they align with critical environments to ensure optimal performance and uptime.

Stream Data Centers and their Critical Environment Services allow IT professionals to plant seeds for the business and spend much less time putting out fires. They offer a commitment to comprehensive account management and 100% uptime ultimately optimizes total cost of data center ownership.

Stream’s critical environments methodology focuses on all areas of service delivery ranging from health and safety, hiring and training, to process improvement, tools and systems. A commitment to comprehensive data center management and 100% uptime ultimately optimizes total cost of data center ownership.

A Look Ahead 

Moving forward, high-density equipment, cloud computing, virtualization, security, and compliance will continue to shape the next-generation critical environment data center architectures and data center management with it. Compared to previous years, organizations must now look for flexible options since their needs may rapidly change.

Technology is evolving at a blistering pace and data center administrators are consistently tasked with providing optimal services and maximum flexibility. Fortunately, with proper planning and a good deployment methodology, critical data center platforms, colocation services, managed services, and business resiliency offerings provide powerful tools for corporate growth. Partnering with the right data center provider will allow your organization to create technological and business competitive advantages in the market.

Remember, managing critical environments, creating a good business resiliency plan, and working with a data center partner means one simple fact: This is a two-way partnership. By ‘partnering’ with a mission-critical capable provider, you are able to align your vision and share that with the provider. From there, your organization and the data center management partner can build an operational infrastructure capable of growth, efficiency, security, and of course—business resiliency.