In while data centre is the heart of enterprise IT infrastructure, the increased complexities in terms of escalating cost of maintenance, expansion in the data centre components, increased manpower cost, besides increased investment around power and cooling, the need for outsourcing the data centre maintenance to a third-party vendor is felt strongly. But the IT heads and the team are unable to take the call on this as they are surrounded with several ambiguities.
However, the story around outsourced only gets stronger with IT infrastructure growth in India projected to reach 0.5 billion in 2012, a 10.3 per cent increase over 2011, as per Gartner. The IT infrastructure market is expected to reach $3.01 billion by 2016.
The data centre services market in India is now seeing a shift towards cutting costs of maintenance, space, technology etc. One of the key factors contributing to this market is the increasing need for data outsourcing.
Also termed as managed service providers (MSPs), the data centre providers allow an organisation to offload some of its operations to third-party service providers. It's often just the right solution when there's a shortage of space, power or cooling and also a helpful way to shift work away from a small IT staff that needs to concentrate on more important projects.
Berjes Shroff, Senior IT Managers, Tata Services Ltd says, Age old companies like ours with traditional in-house enterprise data centres are under attack. We have our data centre located in our head office in the heart of South Mumbai. Since they are too many restrictions of height, AC cooling, power, flooring and ceiling etc for a data centre and as we could not cope up with the challenges, so from the past 8-10 months decided to shift and host our servers with a third party.
He goes on to say, But we are at cross roads, not sure if our archives will be secure or not. But looking at the present needs, have finalized on CtrlS.
Navratna PSU like Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) also feels the same as Baliga B.S., Additional GM (IT&S), BHEL, Electronics Division says, Managing and maintaining a data centre is a very expensive business that needs to run 24X7. We also need manpower that is equally expensive. More ever, we are into power sector and not in the business of running data centres.
But looking at the latest trends, we are in a fix whether to shift data to a third party or go in for re-architecture of our existing set up, he adds.
Similarly, another defense PSU, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) has moved some non-critical servers to ITI and Trimax run data centre. As a defense organisation, we shall retain the critical applications with ourselves, says Rajiv Agrawal, Head Coporate-IT, HAL.
Vendors like CtrlS however continue to attract organisations towards outsourcing but at a slower pace. Sridhar Reddy, CMD of CtrlS Datacentres Ltd says, Data centres are becoming a problem for managing and every 3-5 years it is must that the data centre gets re-architected in terms of space, power, UPS, transformers, AC's etc which is a major investment for any company.
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