Many organizations are experiencing a tremendous increase in the demands for computing system resources. In numerous cases this has placed burdens on their existing data center that cannot be easily upgraded in a cost-effective or timely manner to meet the projected demands. Many older data centers, and even some that were built less than 10 years ago, have become functionally obsolete or at least marginalized. This is due to their inability to deal with newer Data Center Growth Strategies and rising IT hardware power and cooling density requirements. In some cases, they may be functional, but very costly to operate; especially if they are not very energy efficient. While in other instances it may be worthwhile to consider upgrading an older facility, this is fairly impractical while it is operational.
Historically, it was always presumed that larger organi- zations “required” their own data center and would never consider outsourcing it. Over the past few years this traditional view has been re-evaluated by various types and sizes of organizations, including major financial firms. This has caused many organizations to reconsider their options, which generally fall into two major categories: colocation providers or cloud-based resources (or a hybrid approach).
This whitepaper examines some of the short- and long-term issues and challenges that should be part of your due diligence when facing growing demands of your organization’s evolving computing architecture with a good strategy and making economic decisions.
It also provides guidelines for evaluating the alternative choices, such as colocation and hosted service providers, as well as cloud services, which can all be utilized together for enhanced flexibility.