For many organisations, a lack of visibility across their IT estate makes effective infrastructure management akin to herding cats. Maintaining visibility and control over an increasingly complex portfolio of devices becomes time consuming and inefficient. Worse, a lack of visibility exposes the organisation to unnecessary risk.
Without control, complexity can descend into chaos. Simply “keeping the lights on” becomes an all-consuming task for IT professionals who could be better utilised elsewhere, helping to deliver on value-adding, digital transformation projects.
Our old friend mobility, and our new friend the Internet of Things, have helped to extend the reach of the average organisation’s IT estate well beyond what we might consider to be the traditional boundaries of the network. Research suggests that the average number of internet-dependent devices per user is nudging toward 5 and the IoT itself is set to break the 20 billion connected devices barrier by 2020.
Even if your business doesn’t leverage the IoT to any great extent, you are still likely to be looking at an IT estate that contains hundreds, if not thousands of connected devices. Keeping on top of them is more than just a necessary evil.
The interdependency of infrastructure components rarely means that if one fails, it has no impact on the rest of the network. At the same time, not every part of your infrastructure is business-critical. A regular systems audit can help identify those components that are nearing end-of-life, or end of support.
A simple traffic light system can be used to identify the status of a device on the network: Green means low risk as the device is current and supported. Amber means medium risk, where the device is near the end of its life but still supported by the vendor. Red means high risk, where the device has reached the end of its predicated lifecycle and is no longer supported by the vendor.
Even on a basic level, the ability to profile your IT assets in terms of life-cycle allows you to gain greater visibility and control over the estate. It makes cost and product management more predictable and reduces the risk of a catastrophic failure.
When faced with the results of a traditional systems audit, IT managers need to make a call as to whether they swap out a red product or run the risk of a critical systems failure. Most IT managers are risk-averse, so the result is almost always a swap-out; whether the device needs to be replaced or not.
The trouble with this approach is that it only relies on one frame of reference – the technical perspective. What if you could add a layer of intelligence to this that could put the risk into a business perspective too? One that adds a second frame of reference to allow IT to make a more informed risk assessment.
Now, some of you might be thinking “if it’s red, it’s dead”. However, with IT budgets still under pressure, decisions to sweat assets beyond their supported life are made every day. This risk-management approach has become an essential part of delivering long-term ROI for your technology.
To make an informed decision about what assets can be “sweated”, you need to apply a layer of criticality to the device. Within your infrastructure, not all devices were created equal. There are some that can be left to work themselves into retirement and will have little impact on business-critical operations. These may neither require pro-active maintenance or redundancy. Others, will lead to significant business disruption if they fail, so even a low risk is unacceptable.
Many technical audits fail to consider the critical nature of infrastructure components. The reality is, we are much more tolerant of risk when the potential impact of failure is small. Someone once said, “don’t sweat the small stuff”. The irony of this statement is that by not sweating the small stuff (forgetting about the little things that aren’t important), you get to sweat the small stuff!
Managing a modern IT infrastructure is a balance of performance, availability, risk-management and return on investment. None of which is easy without 360-degree visibility. By layering the business impact analysis on top of the standard lifecycle management report it is possible to achieve significant savings on maintenance costs.
If Colocation is the Answer, What is the Question?
When it comes to resilient, affordable IT, it’s all about colocation, colocation, colocation.
I was talking to a customer recently about the age-old problem of delivering more for less. When I mentioned colocation, they initially dismissed it as a kind of Cloud-lite. Something that is more of a transitional phase for organisations that aren’t quite ready to move to a hosted solution.
I know the customer is always supposed to be right, but on this occasion…
This assumes a very narrow perspective of what colocation is and what it can offer your organisation. Yes, colocation can be used as a part of your cloud migration plan, but it shouldn’t be seen as a temporary fix. For many of our customers that have successfully reduced costs and driven additional value, colocation is an integral part of their hybrid IT strategy; consuming a combination of on-premises, Cloud and data centre services.
Whether you are looking to pro-actively drive greater innovation as a part of a digital transformation strategy, or simply sweat some old assets for a while longer, colocation may be the answer.
It is not my intention in this article to discuss what colocation is, rather than what it does – how it answers a lot of the questions facing IT departments today. For any truly digital organisation, colocation can help demonstrate that IT is still able to deliver value for money, despite the moving goalposts.
We have all become increasingly dependent upon technology, not just for transformative projects, but to simply carry out business as usual tasks. The proliferation of user-owned devices, the arrival of the Internet of Things and an increasingly mobile workforce means big data is a way of life. The volume and variety of data produced by everyday workflows far exceeds expectations from as little as 3-5 years ago. Any infrastructure older than this must be stretched to the limit.
In its 2016 report, the Uptime Institute revealed that 65% of enterprise applications are still run in private data centre facilities, 22% are collocated and 12% run exclusively in the cloud. The trouble is, on-premises facilities are typically constrained, either by budget or capacity. As the demands of big data become greater, organisations need to look elsewhere for long-term support.
The physical and virtual resources available to most businesses on-premises are not infinite. Adding flexibility, capacity or agility cannot come at the expense of availability or security. This is where colocation comes into its own; allowing you to drive new projects and innovations in a controlled environment; move new services to the cloud and reduce the strain on internal resources. It is these drivers/factors that are contributing to the expected adoption of colocation which according to TechNavio will grow at a compound annual growing rate of 14.43% through to 2018.
A recent IDC report (April 2017) suggests it’s going to be a big year for hyper-scale data centres; but that this growth will not come at the expense of colocation. The growth in colocation adoption over the past five years is set to continue, as customers continue to enjoy the benefits of flexibility and scalability that typify a colocation model.
Another way in which colocation can add value is in the alleviation of pressure on internal resources. As hard as they work, you cannot expect an internal IT department to provide 24/7 technical support. In addition to the usual tasks associated with “keeping the lights on” there is an increasing emphasis on data management within the workplace – storage, back-up, disaster recovery, replication – it all takes time and resource.
If your IT department is spending all its time fighting fires, it doesn’t have time to dedicate to transformation and innovation. It becomes associated with things that don’t work, rather than making things work better, faster and smarter.
Colocation is also a great way to accelerate the implementation of new projects. Setting up development environments outside the legacy estate to introduce unified communications, back-up and disaster recovery services.
The title of this piece is “if colocation is the answer, what is the question?” So here are some of the questions.
How can I overcome budget constraints and cost effectively introduce new services?
My current back-up and DR service is not very flexible. How can I quickly and cost-effectively add more capacity?
I’m looking to switch to a UK data centre to mitigate any risks associated with data sovereignty and Brexit. What’s my best option?
I’m locked in to a DR contract that is difficult to manage. How can I simplify my data management?
I need to add storage and computing power quickly but don’t have any on-site capacity. What do I do?
When it comes to choosing a partner, it is worth remembering that not all colocation providers are the same. DC specifications and performance can vary widely and not all service providers are committed to adding value.
To see how colocation can play a vital part in your IT strategy, check out our Best Practice Guide. In this convenient guide, we explore the business and technology imperatives driving colocation; along with the key benefits and a 10-point guide to choosing your colocation partner.
Whether you are looking to deploy colocation for the first time, or looking to change your current service provider. Now is the ideal time to talk to Thrive.