Help! Finding a partner for IT infrastructure success

If your IT infrastructure is like that of many companies, managing it all can become overwhelming. Management includes purchasing IT infrastructure and licenses for the applications the company runs and hiring enough IT staff to ensure everything is operational. The result might be a complex and expensive environment just to do business, and the complexity and expense become greater as the business grows. Perhaps IT now faces maintenance and scalability issues that you don't want to manage yourself. Maybe the IT infrastructure is running smoothly, but you need some assistance here and there. Or maybe your company is a start-up that's not yet ready to invest in and manage a comprehensive IT infrastructure. It's time to look for help. External IT infrastructure providers can offer solutions through three important approaches: custom data centers, colocation, and cloud.

Some external IT providers can build and host a data center suite for their customers. These providers take care of the details of the space, including buying or leasing buildings and providing fault-tolerant power, cooling, physical security, and so forth. They can deploy servers as well as all the storage, routers, and other support peripherals needed.

In a colocation arrangement, companies can rent infrastructure space in an existing shared data center. Such space might range from single cabinets to multirack cages to private suites and include configurable primary and redundant power options.

Finally, on the far end of the spectrum, procuring infrastructure capabilities as cloud services is another way to get help from external IT providers.

Custom data centers, colocation, and cloud: how to decide which options to use

For some companies, keeping IT in-house may make the most sense, especially for organizations in which the applications themselves are the product, as with an e-commerce or technology services company. When companies write their own applications and have customized needs for those applications, they're usually well equipped to handle their IT infrastructure.

But a company that has a large and complex infrastructure might not want to manage the environment completely, and it might not want to pay for all the equipment and related expenses anymore. For such companies, custom data centers provide an attractive solution. Other, perhaps smaller, organizations might opt for colocation, in which they rent a particular quantity of infrastructure to house their equipment while gaining access to broader support resources. And using cloud services to meet IT infrastructure requirements can offer organizations of all sizes greater elasticity as their business and technology needs change.

Custom data centers and colocation for stability, scalability, and footprint

Some companies might invest in their data center and services, but the environment has become bogged down by less-important applications that don’t drive the business. If a company isn't yet ready to retire those applications, it could move them to an external IT provider. That approach allows the company to keep its infrastructure and staff focused on the most important services and tasks.

In another scenario, a company could have doubts about the data center it owns. The business might have invested a significant amount of money in its data center infrastructure, but that infrastructure is becoming old and unreliable. They could be in a situation where application growth is stretching the capacity of their data center. Maybe one data center is near a geological fault line that could be susceptible to earthquakes and the other one is in a region that often experiences hurricanes. The company could be concerned about what might happen to the primary applications that run the business if a disaster occurs. The business might consider using the data center services of an established provider that has designed an infrastructure to withstand disasters, provides geographic diversity, or offers scalability for forecasted growth.

If latency and performance are critical in the applications that run a business, then the IT infrastructure often must be located close to the users. Rather than setting up multiple data centers to support applications across the country or the world, a company might outsource its infrastructure to IT providers that already have the footprint the company needs.

Cloud for flexibility

Cloud often is well suited for companies that rely on Internet-based transactions and for start-up companies that might want to wait before spending tremendous amounts of money on their IT infrastructure. Investors and venture capitalists today have embraced the cloud and the measured investment it enables. Before cloud, investors poured money into start-ups simply to establish the IT infrastructure. It was a big bet. Now cloud services let investors spend a smaller sum of money on IT infrastructure for their start-ups upfront and grow their investment as the business proves itself.

Established companies also can benefit from cloud infrastructure. For example, they might want to bring a new application online and experiment with it. If they’re not sure how quickly the application will grow, they don't know how many actual servers and how much storage and IT infrastructure they'll need to support the environment. The cloud gives them flexibility while they experiment.
Some larger firms even choose to leverage the cloud to help offload unwieldy amounts of data that are costly to store on-premise. With the backup options available with an external provider, they can maintain that treasure trove of information in a cloud without incurring the same costs. Cloud benefits apply equally to server capacity and to storage infrastructure.

How the three options might work together

If yours is a very small company or a start-up, using just cloud services might be an initial approach to getting off the ground. As the company grows, it will invest internally in applications, IT infrastructure, and capital, and it must commit to future investments. In this case, a mix of custom data center, colocation space, and cloud from external IT providers might be an ideal solution.

Perhaps your company runs some applications in a colocation space. If an application has significantly more use in a short period of time, consider extending from colocation, which is a less dynamic environment, into a more flexible cloud with that same application. Maybe you need to burst into a cloud because the demand for some applications is unknown and spikes unexpectedly. Or maybe some applications are integrated with others, and cloud enables more straightforward data sharing.

The cloud can be a good solution when you need flexibility, such as when introducing new applications. Or perhaps a particular online application is naturally dynamic — maybe it is seasonal — and running it in a cloud is the best approach to minimizing costs in low-demand periods. Once the pattern of usage is established, some applications may be predictable enough to host in a colocation environment, where you can balance their ebbs and flows against other workloads in your portfolio.

Whether you procure a custom data center, colocation space, or cloud, or combinations of the three, from external IT providers, consider the following suggestions before proceeding. These suggestions include articulating your business and technology requirements, thinking ahead, working with a partner, and taking a holistic view of your environment.

Articulate your business and technology requirements

Your specific business requirements will define the type of services you need from a provider. First, look at the business case and then the user case for how the applications will be run.

What will be the lifecycle of this application or application environment? How dynamic does it need to be, and how might it change? How will the applications and the environment need to respond? How will they need to behave on a day-to-day basis? Truly understand specifically how you want the environment and the applications to run so they meet the requirements of the business.

Also think about the nature of the business. Is your organization a government entity, a hospital, or an Internet marketplace, for example? All these scenarios will help define the type of cloud to use, because not all clouds are the same. Ask yourself: Is this the best and most secure environment for my IT needs? Or maybe the top concerns are elasticity, availability, or the latency response time.

Remember that you’re entrusting your business, your crown jewels, to a service provider. You'll want to factor more than price into the decision. Really look at your specific needs, and then determine who matches those needs most accurately and directly.

Think ahead

Try to anticipate the problems and challenges your company might encounter later. As a company grows, it might face additional scalability, maintenance, and manageability challenges. Or perhaps it knows that eventually it will use the cloud, but it’s not sure how.

Early on, talk with external IT providers. Talk expansively, capturing those issues you anticipate facing in the future. Providers should be able to map out a sensible course of action with you. Then, when additional components or capabilities become necessary, they have already been planned out and architected. Planning up front can make a difference later.

Work with a partner

Make sure that a vendor truly understands your requirements and can meet the infrastructure needs of the applications your organization delivers today, as well as partnering with you to meet your needs into the future. Look for a vendor that has a vision and the foresight to grow with you as business requirements and technologies grow and change. When an external IT provider is very focused on the business and on being a partner — not just a commodity provider of space, power, cooling, and CPU cycles — your organization can be better equipped for the future.

Take a holistic view of your environment

As you plan or change your IT infrastructure, understand the business, its business issues and challenges, its vertical market, and the partner ecosystem. Focus on how the company interacts with key groups today and how it wants to interact with them tomorrow. When looking at external IT providers, consider the advantages of using a single vendor.

A single vendor can partner with you and help provide a holistic view. Some applications may reside in custom data centers, colocation environments, and the cloud, spanning several different locations. The users of those applications have requirements regarding latency, disaster recovery, and business continuity. It’s good to work with one provider that can understand the holistic viewpoint of how your company runs its business.

An external IT provider that offers all three types of services (custom data center, colocation, and cloud) should understand how to overlay your company's scenario onto the provider's infrastructure, both physical and virtual, to accommodate the exact requirements. Separate solution providers might not offer that holistic perspective, leaving you with a greater management burden. IT is critical to your business, so develop a partnership relationship with your providers to ensure that you can walk hand in hand into the future.

Foundation for the future

Whether your company wants to offload or expand its IT infrastructure, external IT service providers can help through custom data centers, colocation, and cloud. By articulating the business and technology requirements, planning ahead, working with a partner, and taking a holistic view of the IT environment, you can set a foundation for your company's IT future.

About QTS

QTS is the third largest data center provider in the US and provides core data center services - custom data center services, colocation services, and cloud services - to meet the varied infrastructure requirements of its customers' Web services environments. With carrier neutral connectivity to hundreds of access providers and a full array of monitoring and managed services, QTS offers the complete solution to your data center IT infrastructure hosting needs. For more information, visit www.qualitytech.com.