- Many businesses find IT challenging to build, operate, and maintain the multiple technical elements needed to support a modern data centre
- It can require hiring teams of IT professionals who can support complex data centres, which is becoming increasingly challenging due to a shortage of IT workers.
- Many IT and organisational leaders are considering data centre as a Service (DCaaS) options to enable access to these resources.
- IT leaders who decide to use DCaaS do so for a variety of reasons, and those decisions depend on the business’s risk appetite, the size and skills of its IT team, its preferred accounting and financing model, the architecture model, and its approach to real estate.
Present situation of data centre industry
Many businesses across all industries are operating data centres to support their business operations. But most of these companies are not in the data centre business.
They may be manufacturers or retailers, law firms or other businesses, but their core mission is not to run data centres.
In addition, as technology evolves, many businesses find it challenging to build, operate, and maintain the multiple technical elements needed to build, operate, and maintain a data centre capable of supporting modern business applications. They need to hire and retain a team of IT professionals who can support complex data centres, which is becoming increasingly challenging as the IT industry faces a shortage of skilled workers.
To simplify this situation, many IT and enterprise leaders are considering data centre as a Service (DCaaS) options, where a third-party provider runs the data centre (including servers, networks, storage, and other compute resources) for clients, enabling access to those resources.
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What is the DCaaS program?
“It’s really a paradigm shift for a business in terms of the support model,” said Derek Hay, field CIO at CDW. “You gave the key to someone else.”
In a DCaaS program, a provider provides the technical resources a company needs to run its business. Providers can run data centres on customers’ premises or in their own colocation facilities, but the resources are used as services, offering greater flexibility and scalability, as well as a more flexible cost structure. The provider manages the infrastructure, ensures that uptime reaches agreed levels, and maintains operations so that customers can use resources as needed.
“Storage and compute are scalable and available on a per-consumption basis. Monitoring, uptime, billing and even disposal of end-of-life hardware are managed by the provider, “said Urban Haas, field CIO at CDW. “They can handle the entire life cycle of the data centre.”
Businesses choose DCaaS for several advantages
IT leaders who decide to use DCaaS do so for a variety of reasons. These decisions depend on a business’s appetite for risk, the size and skills of its IT team, its preferred accounting and financing model, the architecture model, and its approach to real estate.
Typically, DCaaS partnerships will begin when an enterprise’s current data centre equipment reaches its recommended useful life, or when IT leaders want to expand data centre operations.
A common motivation is to remove data centre operations from the responsibilities of the IT team so that it can focus on other priorities, such as the task of generating revenue for the enterprise. “They’re looking for flexibility and want to not have to maintain technology – they want to get rid of that,” Haas said. “They don’t want to do the capacity planning, maintenance and feeding of the data centre.
Hay says this is often a particularly attractive option for small businesses looking to reduce staffing risk. If a small company has only one storage administrator responsible for maintaining its storage environment, having that person retire or leave to another employer can cause significant disruption. The DCaaS provider has multiple administrators to handle this responsibility.
The DCaaS partnership offers enterprises a fresh approach to their IT infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, data centre operations are handled by service providers, who have the expertise and personnel to accomplish this task. Providers perform routine maintenance tasks that are often time consuming but do little to create value for the business.
“Lifecycle management is the responsibility of the service provider,” says Hay. “Customers don’t have to patch the platform. They don’t have to upgrade their platforms.
Many IT leaders also value the reporting that service providers can provide. These periodic reports provide detailed information about what resources are being consumed and how they are being used, giving businesses greater insight into their IT operations.
Because of these benefits, DCaaS has become a necessity for businesses. Finding a DCaaS provider that can meet the unique needs of your business is critical to successful engagement. Haas says the first step is to carefully assess the needs and goals of the business to gain a deeper understanding of what the data centre is capable of in terms of performance and capacity.
“We start by listening and trying to understand why they’re important from a business perspective,” he said. “We then make recommendations on alternatives and considerations based on our experience and partnerships.” Together, we can design a comprehensive solution to meet their business needs and coordinate the implementation of the solution in a way that meets their time and operational risk appetite.
The future is data centre as a service
At the end of the day, each DCaaS project is unique, but each gives the client enterprise a data centre that meets its infrastructure needs, so users can focus your resources on the business, not IT.
The truth is, whether we realise it or not, we’ve gotten used to thinking of the data centre as a fluid thing, especially if we use a cluster paradigm like Kubernetes. We think of Pods as tiny computers running individual applications, which we boot and disassemble at will. We create applications using multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures to take advantage of the best of each workload.
Edge computing pushes this analogy further, as we actually start additional nodes on demand and the network ADAPTS to the new topology.
Of course; As the pace of innovation accelerates, we need to be able to tear down a compromised data centre, either build a new one to replace it, or enhance it at a moment’s notice.
In a way, that’s what we’ve been doing with public cloud providers: instantiating the “hardware” when we need it and tearing it down when we don’t. We’ve been doing this on cloud provider terms, where every public cloud is racing to lock in as many companies and workloads as possible and compete on cost so they can control the conversation.
Just as we have become accustomed to launching cloud workloads without having to worry about the specific servers it will run on, what we need is the ability to launch new data centres or existing data centre resources. We need to be able to do that without having to agonise over where those resources are actually going, knowing that whatever requirements we have, whether cost-based, regulatory or geographic, they will be met.
Only then can we have true infrastructure-as-a-service.
