These days, there are fewer reasons to have your own data center.
There’s no denying that data centers are hugely expensive. Studies have shown that building out an existing property can cost USD 200 per square foot, and for a new facility, upward of USD 1,000 per square foot. To reach your data centre with your network you would need to lay fibre, which can cost anywhere from USD 10,000 to USD 25,000 per mile. For a data center of any reasonable size, overall costs begin in the millions of dollars.
And, of course, data centers incur significant expenses in operations: for everything from facilities maintenance and electricity (which could be tens of thousands of dollars per megawatt, or more) to cooling, physical security, network security, the servers themselves, software licences, storage networking, human resource costs and so on. None of these expenses directly return value to the business.
Once functioning, the day-to-day processes of a data centre can be complex, expensive and time-consuming. A new application requires hardware (server, network,storage) to run, and all these must be procured and provisioned, which can take days, weeks or longer – delaying time for the application to actually generate the value toward its original goal.
We require instantly available computing technology that can be used as needed and then discarded when not. Like electricity and the telephone, computing should be available ‘as a service’ and not as a massive capital expense, and that is the promise of the cloud – a promise that is being realized today by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. Cloud computing is available to you on a pay-as-you-go basis: you pay for the resources you use, and when you no longer need them, you no longer pay.
As we show, with cloud technology, and specifically a form of it called infrastructure as a service (IaaS – pronounced ‘eye-as’), you can outsource your data center to a public cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure. Using the IaaS capabilities of Azure, you can migrate your applications to the cloud and over time decrease, and perhaps eliminate altogether, your dependence on traditional data centers.
By using Azure as a ‘virtual data centre’, you can
You have choices when it comes to cloud providers. When considering which one to use, think about the following criteria:
Is your cloud provider global? Does it have data centers in every area where you may consider doing business? Even if yours is not a global company today, it may be tomorrow; therefore, it behoves you to be ready.
Microsoft Azure, as shown in the chart below, has more than 54 different regions all over the world, with more coming online all the time (check here for the latest list).
Only a few cloud providers can operate at the scale needed to assure you that your applications – today and tomorrow – will be able to consume all the capacity they need. According to the website, Azure is available in 140 countries with up to 1.6 Pbps of bandwidth in a region and counting.
Your cloud provider should provide you with contractual service-level agreements that are well documented and broken down by service. In the case of Microsoft Azure, the overall SLA, or guaranteed uptime, is 99.9%, with some individual services having higher SLAs.
Look at how your cloud provider can help you ensure compliance with country and local regulations as well as with industry standards. Cloud providers like Microsoft work closely with governments and industry to ensure Azure is strictly compliant.
In addition, examine how your cloud provider helps you maintain the security of your applications and data. In Microsoft Azure, your data is your data and is only accessible to you. Determining the level of physical security of cloud data centres, involving technologies like encryption and strong authentication, among others, is key to helping you evaluate a cloud provider. We spend more time discussing governance, risk, compliance and security later on.
Think about choosing a cloud provider that has extensive experience not just in the cloud but in all aspects of corporate computing, and one with an extensive ecosystem of partner solutions that can accelerate the realization of your business objectives.
Finally, consider your long-term business road map and the goals you want to achieve. You want a partner who will be ‘in it’ with you for the long term, who can supply state-of-the-art technology when you need it and who is constantly innovating like you.