The Promise and Challenges of the Modern Data Center

This is the first entry in a Data Center Frontier series that explores how to address the challenges of the modern data center and mission critical environments. This series, compiled in a special report, also explores design and management for mission-critical data centers. 

The stakes are certainly high. Consider this—only 27% of companies received a passing grade for disaster readiness, according to a survey by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council. At the same time, increased dependency on the data center providers means that overall outages and downtime are growing costlier over time.

Ponemon Institute has just released the results of the latest “Cost of Data Center Outages” study. Previously published in 2010 and 2013, the purpose of this third study is to continue to analyze the cost behavior of unplanned data center outages. According to the new study, the average cost of a data center outage has steadily increased from $505,502 in 2010 to $740,357 today (or a 38 percent net change).

Throughout their research of 63 modern data center environments, the study found that:

• The cost of downtime has increased 38 percent since the first study in 2010.
• Downtime costs for the most data center-dependent businesses are rising faster than average.
• Maximum downtime costs increased 32 percent since 2013 and 81 percent since 2010.
• Maximum downtime costs for 2016 are $2,409,991.

In a related finding, an Avaya survey of mid-to-large companies in the U.S., Canada and U.K. found that 80% of companies experiencing downtime from core network errors lost revenue. The average company lost $140,003 per incident. Financial sector enterprises lost an average of $540,358 per incident.

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It’s not just business. It’s personal. The resulting impact on a career can be significant: a surprising 1 in 5 companies fired an IT employee when a network downtime incident occurred. The factor was more dramatic for some industries. Respondents also said that 1 in 3 companies in the natural resources, utilities and telecom sector terminated IT staff due to downtime caused by network change errors.

A recent Cisco report indicates that the data stored in data centers will quintuple by 2020 to reach 915 EB by 2020, up 5.3-fold (a CAGR of 40%) from 171 EB in 2015.

With this in mind, it’s important to define mission-critical systems and how to protect your most valuable data center operations.

Defining a Critical Environment

Critical facilities are the backbone of an organization. This means working with mission-critical operations and services, supporting multi-tenant carriers, and even free-standing Tier IV data centers. Critical environments require maximize uptime and value without compromising health, safety and security. And, to support these types of environments, you may require comprehensive account management and 100% uptime.

Because of these specifications, you’ll need to be very careful when you select your data center partner. Most of all, these critical environments don’t just require services—they need a team that’s capable of fully supporting these types of systems. Mission-critical deploy-ments will require a team and data center partnership which is capable of handling advanced governance, operations, and use-cases.

Understanding the Reliance on the Modern Data Center

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In general, the data center has become a lot more mission-critical. This is why having mission-critical operations teams which are ready to manage your data center requirements is so important. Cisco’s recent report indicates that global data center IP traffic will grow 3-fold over the next 5 years. Overall, data center IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27 percent from 2015 to 2020.

Furthermore, globally, the data stored in data centers will quintuple by 2020 to reach 915 EB by 2020, up 5.3-fold (a CAGR of 40%) from 171 EB in 2015. This means that organizations are actively growing their critical data center operations and require new ways to keep those operations mission-critical operations running optimally.

Protecting your Data Center, Your Business and your Most Critical Systems

The only way to improve the critical environment management experience is through exceptional people and services. Leading critical-environment data center partners help manage advanced governance requirements by providing services like document control, financial reporting and responsibility assignment matrix models for identifying roles and responsibilities. From there, whether you’re in healthcare, financial services, industrial, or even pharmaceutical, you’re capable of deploying your mission-critical environment while leveraging compliance with recognized standards including PCI, HIPPA, ISO, SSAE 16 (SOC 1 & 2).

Furthermore, to protect your critical environment data center and business process, leading critical-environment services delivery partners are capable of providing audit support against compliance related to data center operations, physical security, insurance standards, ISO 9001 and FM Global.

There is nothing wrong with protecting IT systems through solutions that provide disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and cyber security. The difficulty is that the world has changed. As systems got more complex and interdependent, these have become single-point strategies which, in some cases, don’t encompass the entire set of threats that can be faced by today’s IT systems. Outside of just complexity and interdependence, these systems have also become absolutely critical to our business.

When designing a data center framework that’s capable of supporting today’s requirements, IT and data center leaders must architect solutions aimed at protecting critical environments. But, to get started, you need to understand the core design elements.