The thought of digital transformation has gotten lots of attention in recent years. It involves not merely the implementation of new technologies, nevertheless the alteration of business processes and models to fully leverage those technologies. This enables organizations to achieve unprecedented levels of productivity, enhance the client experience, drive innovation and create competitive advantages. It sounds greater theoretically but in practice it's extremely challenging. Most organizations still allocate well over 80 percent of the IT budget toward "keeping the lights on." It's difficult to transform your organization when you're struggling to control and maintain legacy IT architectures.
For a lot of organizations, the challenges begin with the information center infrastructure. Aging facilities lack the ability and scalability to support rapidly changing technology demands. Power and cooling costs continue to increase, further straining IT budgets. Digital transformation must start with transformation to ensure the right foundation is in place. According to IDC, the common U.S. data center is 12 years old. These facilities simply weren't created for today's high-density environments, with large numbers of servers and other devices and ever-increasing space, power and cooling requirements. The study firm notes that lots of organizations have to update the style and operation of their environment before they can begin implementing new systems and technologies.
Data center transformation can deliver real business benefits, including reduced costs and greater IT agility. That's never to declare that it's easy, however. Data center modernization requires skill sets that few organizations have in-house, in addition to substantial IT resources. With limited budgets and staff, many organizations are just unable to battle a data modernization project. The good thing is there are more choices than ever Digital Transformation. In addition to designing and building out an in-house data center, organizations can lease space from the hosting provider, house hardware in a co-location facility or even move certain applications and services to the cloud. Each approach has benefits and drawbacks, and many organizations utilize several option.
Outsourcing to a co-location or hosting provider enables organizations to obtain a new facility online quickly, and helps to alleviate the staffing challenges that plague many IT organizations. Upfront investments are lower, and well-designed facilities will offer efficiencies and economies of scale that reduce total cost of ownership. On the other hand, building an in-house data centers makes more sense for large deployments, and facilities with a left expectancy in excess of five years. In-house centers also afford greater control within the IT environment. Digital transformation often starts with data center transformation, but in case you build or buy? This is actually the very challenge organizations have to tackle beforehand.
