Eliminating Data Centers?

Whether it is or is not realistic to have a data center depends on the size of your organization and the business goals. Lets be honest here, data centers can be a headache to keep up. There are countless articles published that mention the headaches that companies go through with data centers. More specifically they touch upon energy consumption and the task of keeping a data center cool.

Another issue that comes up with data centers involve where to host them. Facebook decided to move one of its data center to a very cold region in northern Sweden.  As well, Microsoft debated with opening one underwater. Lastly, Google used their AI expertise to trim cost. As you can see, these are luxuries that large organizations can do to maintain their data centers. Smaller organizations may benefit from using a data center third party as you do not need quite the experts to handle it and it can be much more affordable. 

The biggest challenge of eliminating a data center is essentially that: eliminating the data center. As well, it’s also deciding what to do with the already built infrastructure/data. To do so effectively, you need to find an expert who knows how to safely strip the data center down to its leanest parts without disrupting the operations of the business. A company would need to find a reliable third party backup. After backups, then you deal with things like email and authentication. A lot of the work is finding the vendors or the experts to help take care of the items that were once covered by the data center.

As well, clearing out Active Directory as one of the biggest challenges. The Active Directory they had infiltrated everything they did, as it spread everywhere. While normally that is something you want when you have a data center, it is also a headache to remove when you are eliminating a data center.

The fact that more applications are in the cloud probably helps out in terms of operations. Like mentioned in the interview, having applications in the cloud allow companies to downsize their IT staff. As well, since IT does not have to focus directly on those applications (cloud providers do many of the functions formerly done by IT), it can focus on the everyday business operations. In other words, IT staffs will be more ready and able to assist with everyday operations. In terms of skills, the more applications in the cloud means a higher need for IT workers to have cloud applications skills. I do not think this means you need more IT workers. I believe you just need staff with different skill sets. This can be supported by the different job postings in the IT sector. If you take a look, you do see employers looking for cloud based knowledge now as well.

Wanting to take a different approach, I would say that one of the leading causes of LAN outages is human fault/error. Similar to security breaches, I believe we tend to overlook the role human error plays in these events. For example, in 2009, Cisco reported a 2 hour outage that was caused by, you guessed it, human error. The error was caused by an “inadvertent network change”. Below is the source I used if you will like to learn more. As well, I have read that there have been surveys conducted that show that human error is one of the root causes for LAN outages.  

To avoid and decrease outages, I believe it is extremely important for organizations need to monitor. Monitoring is helpful because it allows the organizations to quickly identify any issues and respond in a swift matter, decreasing downtime. Second, I would say preparing for the worse and creating an action plan. Similar to disaster recover, having a plan in case you experience downtime will go a long way in decreasing the length of down time, rather than coming up with a plan when it happens. Lets face it, errors will happen and as a result, downtime will occur. Best to be prepared.