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While every business, regardless of industry, revolves around return on investment, or RoI, the phrase is most used in IT. Every product, solution or technology needs to justify its RoI to users. The more recent phenomenon in the sector has been around justifying the RoI of a data centre based on various trends.
The RoI essentially has to result in significant capex and opex savings for an organisation. The data centre has become the critical cost-saving component for an organisation given that about 30 per cent of total opex goes towards building a centre.
Firefighting
The challenge for IT managers, then, lies in dealing with the data centre complexities given the plethora of applications and components that it envelopes. So also ensuring the overall RoI in a short span of time is a Herculean task. The firefighting starts from understanding the factors and components which result in excess billing. This is around power costs, access control, operations, database administration, server administration, information security issues, asset management and varied applications management. The primary task is to decide which model of a data centre will result in better economies of scale and reduce the overall cost of maintaining a centre. In the current scenario, most enterprises have their own captive data centres take control of their server rooms, along with other infrastructure and applications. It is getting a little too difficult to justify the RoI as the incremental cost of maintaining the data centre is getting higher, more so with the expansion in the business. Most organisations are treating IT as a cost centre and not a catalyst for growth, which makes the task of mitigating the RoI more difficult for IT managers.
Walking on Clouds
With the main burden of reducing costs, IT managers find solace in trying out the Cloud model. Besides consolidation of servers through the virtualisation process, some amount of the Cloud-based service model is taken note of. The SMB segment is leapfrogging in this area, porting their applications on Clouds due to the expense of setting up a data centre of their own. Enterprises are working out a co-location model to transfer some of their assets to the third party location, which has witnessed significant reduction in power-related costs. The IT managers compel the third party service providers to offer a redundant, secure facility with multiple bandwidth options and provide specific services around security, storage, recovery, consulting, and achieve optimum usage of assets. Renting applications based on the pay-per-use model has been the phenomenon. With dedicated server and rack space assigned to the customer, the security aspect is well adhered to. SaaS, which is part of the Cloud model, is increasingly catering to customer needs. However, customers are required to sign strict SLAs with the Cloud service providers, which is indeed a big deal. Some of the criteria, which are mandatory for the service providers, are to provide a dashboard which is under the customers control and take every preventive action to protect against security threats and data thefts. The latter is the primary cause of concern for IT heads, besides server performance.
The Cloud model does seem to increase data centre efficiency. There is sufficient room for clustering and load balancing to ensure proper backup. IT managers are taking a dual data centre model approach to impress upon management that IT investment is justified to drive qualitative improvement in customer service and help the company retain clients. Most customer-centric applications, such as CRM, are being provided on the Cloud model, which in a way reduces the burden on the in-house data centre.
Amit Kumar is Founder & CEO, Kasper Consulting Pvt. Ltd.
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