Managing small data centres
A short guide to running secure and resilient data centres for mid-sized businesses
A sound IT infrastructure is fundamental to today’s businesses and when that infrastructure fails the consequences can be far reaching. Whether it is business-tobusiness, business-to-consumer or public sector organisations serving citizens, applications and the services they drive increasingly need to be available all day, every day. Many organisations find it hard to achieve such service levels. This briefing looks at some possible solutions
- To remain competitive and grow, businesses need to be responsive to the needs of their customers and seek new markets
Customers, whether businesses or consumers, have come to expect continuously available services from suppliers. In turn suppliers aspire to serve broader geographic markets
- The ability to provide continuously available services is under-pinned by IT applications that today are critical to many businesses operations
If these applications become unavailable through poor management or component failure, or if data is lost or compromised, the business suffers and customer loyalty is impacted and reputation damaged
- For many mid-sized businesses (typically those from 200 to 2,000 employees) this can be a huge challenge
Managing IT is not their core competence, getting sufficient expertise in-house is hard and expensive and building enterprise class data centres is impractical
- But it can be affordable. 3rd parties can offer enterprise class data centre facilities
Such facilities have physical security levels beyond those of most enterprises, they have robust defences against fire, flood and other disasters, backup power supplies, they are adjacent to internet backbones and the extra security of a backup failover system is possible through the use of more than one location
- However, if a poorly managed sound data centre facility is not enough, inhouse or outsourced, good IT management is a fundamental requirement
This includes mundane tasks like asset management, backup and recovery, as well as the ability to minimise and cope with emergencies such as security alerts or disk crashes
- To help with this, many mid-sized businesses are turning to managed service providers (MSPs)
Through economies of scale MSPs can invest in enterprise class management tools and expertise to make sure the business applications they rely on to serve their customers remain available, all day every day
The all day every day economy It is 40 years ago this month that Reg Varney (a one-time British comedy actor) demonstrated the first ever cash withdrawal from an ATM in Enfield, North London. This new technology would give the bank’s customers access to their cash whenever they wanted it, but more importantly to the banks, it would free up their staff to focus on transactions more profitable than dishing out cash – such as providing loans or investment advice – i.e. banks would be more productive. Good for all – unless the technology enabling the new service failed.
ATMs are an early example of technology enabling a business to transact with its customers more flexibly. In the last fifteen years or so that opportunity has opened up for almost every business, be it for transacting directly with consumers or with other businesses. The communications technology that has enabled this revolution is the internet, which has put every business and its IT infrastructure online.
Direct electronic communications has allowed businesses to transact with customers and each other 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and to address global markets. But to do this requires that the IT systems that drive it all are continuously available. Whether it is a supply chain system linking many suppliers to high street retail outlets, an e-retailer selling music direct to consumers or a software vendor providing security updates to businesses, down time – planned or unplanned – is no longer acceptable.
It is said that people are more likely to get divorced than change banks, but in other areas customers are more fickle. Whether transacting on behalf of their employer or for themselves, individuals will go somewhere else pretty quickly if a business service is perceived to be unavailable. Today, being open for business means that information technology (IT) systems are up and running all day every day.
