Data Center Migration, three words that can cause sleepless nights to even the most experienced professionals involved in enterprise IT and facilities departments. While it can be a daunt- ing challenge, it also offers a great opportunity to improve and rethink your IT architecture and examine how well it meshes with your organization’s long term business strategies.
Before you can begin to analyze or make any meaningful deci- sions as to what or where you want to migrate your organiza- tion’s IT systems and data centers to, you need to first step back and understand what your immediate and long terms goals are for your organization and how it would be best served by your organizations computing architecture. CIOs and CTOs need to keep an open mind and examine existing systems closely as
to how well they meet your organizations business strategies. Conversely, major decisions made by senior management CEOs and CFOs who are typically segregated from the details of the data center and IT departments could result in a less than opti- mal long term IT strategy.
There is an emerging trend which is growing rapidly toward out- sourcing the data center as many organizations re-evaluate the cost and need to build, own and operate their own data centers. Many organizations are either outsourcing the data center and IT functions (in whole or in part), in an effort to reduce costs and concentrate their resources on their core business. The result, the need to migrate IT systems and hardware to another data center or host applications with service providers or a combina- tion of both.
This whitepaper examines some of the major strategic issues that should be an integral part of your evaluation when forming a data center migration strategy.