Outsourcing data center infrastructure

Setting up your own data center is expensive in terms of money, time and deployment of human resources but it is more efficient to outsource this service, which will save your company costs and allow the business to focus on core competencies.

According to WiseGEEK answers, infrastructure outsourcing is a subcontracting service in which the management of an organization’s IT systems and applications are handled by a third party. This service enables enterprises to achieve high performance, to cut costs and sustain profitability.

Besides reducing costs, IT infrastructure outsourcing provides a management model that allows organizations to move away from complex and inefficient IT environments and build IT capabilities that are more agile, reliable and responsive to their business models. The management of a company’s IT infrastructure and applications is often done from a remote location. Some customers choose local providers, while others prefer to outsource offshore.

What should be considered when signing an infrastructure outsourcing agreement?

• If the management of a customer’s network routers and switches, security mechanism, desktops and peripherals, disk storage and bandwidth is also ensured by the provider, it is very important to have a clear understanding of the capabilities of the providers in-house IT department. However, the provider and the customer should collaborate in order to obtain a solution that best fits the customer’s needs and business objectives.
• Costs. When comparing in-house data center infrastructure with outsourcing to an external hosting provider, the customer should calculate all the costs of an internal facilities and then compare these to the annual costs of external hosting. By costs of internal facilities I mean costs of licensing, maintenance, security power, connectivity, cooling, property costs, staffing resources.  

As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, the final goal of outsourcing the data center infrastructure is to ensure the business development. Either this is done in-house, external, or through a hybrid solution, I recommend every single organization to go through a business impact analysis in order to determine the value of each process to the organisation and to establish the most appropriate solution.

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