The benefits of moving to the Cloud are well known and self-evident: CAPEX becomes OPEX and costs are cut while mobility, flexibility, support, ease-of-updating and all-round efficiencies improve. On top of all that, there’s unprecedented new potential for elevated customer experience. However, there are many challenges in moving workloads to the Cloud.
The most obvious include the sizeable up-front investment and the many issues related to integrating systems and maintaining business continuity. However, for some businesses it boils down to a misplaced sense of value. After all, how much does it cost to sweat the last ounce of value out of your existing infrastructure?
CIOs know how their infrastructure costs amortise over five years, but accountants know the costs do not stop there. Operating infrastructure on-premises carries on-going, above-average, support and power expenses, plus associated costs in ensuring there is suitable security infrastructure, cooling, humidity mitigation and noise management in place.
Meanwhile, HR professionals are aware that noisy environments can distract and bother employees – whether it be due to the equipment itself or the increased air conditioning required to cool it – to the point where it harms the on-premises social climate and makes workers less productive, happy and loyal. But how do you shift critical, legacy infrastructure without impacting the long-standing risk management postures that have been built around it?
The solution is colocation. This hybrid cloud infrastructure sees your most important hardware move off-site to a specialist facility where it’s secured, powered, connected and maintained in a far more efficient way. This eliminates all of the significant infrastructure and operational costs involved in managing it as well as freeing up valuable space for workers or downsizing the administrative environment altogether.
If this is ringing any bells in your organisation, then your CIO needs to get in touch with NEXTDC.
How does colocation work?
Whether your equipment is located around the office, in a special cupboard or housed in a dedicated data centre that runs its own microclimate, there are numerous advantages to moving it offsite. Dedicated hyperscale colocation facilities have special, lower-cost, 24/7 electricity deals with power suppliers which support the 100% uptime requirements demanded by always-on, critical IT.
Industrial-scale UPS back-up is both part of the fundamental infrastructure and, again, much more cost-efficiently managed. Air conditioning systems are specifically designed and managed to efficiently keep equipment running optimally and without the damaging effects caused by humidity which actively contributes to lowering the total cost of ownership.
Valuable IT Management-as-a-Service opportunities also present themselves with on-site, with rapid-response and specialist technicians being readily available, resulting in fewer expensive callout fees. There is no longer any need for on-site tech support to be employed to sit around waiting for something to go wrong.
Colocation has rapidly become a proven business model. NEXTDC has been operating in the space for many years already with CIO, Jeff Arndt, pointing out that it “Grew quickly out of the need for cost rationalisation, risk minimalisation while simultaneously enabling more flexible and scalable environments.”
Perhaps, not surprisingly, NEXTDC learned almost as much from migrating its own infrastructure, operations and services as it has from its customers. It now uses cloud to enable its own business strategy and proactively actions legacy to stop it becoming the crisis – a vacuum for human and capital resources.
Arndt says NEXTDC used to operate with multiple partners to create bespoke infrastructure for clients but, over time, realised the lack of unifying blueprint had meant subsequent migration to the cloud required similar degrees of complex, bespoke design and management.
As a result, NEXTDC developed a holistic approach to ensure the disparate legacy equipment and architecture that resided on customer premises, sometimes in the same data centre, would be migrated to hyperscale colocation facilities with a more consolidated footprint. This new cloud-defined operating model simplifies deployment and management of existing and new workloads.
As a result of this, NEXTDC has developed internal expertise at unravelling the most elaborate architectural legacy-infrastructural mess and transforming it into a manageable off-site service. It has walked the digital transformation journey within its own business as it develops an infrastructure model that is enabling other businesses to follow suit.
Who should look at colocation?
Ultimately, any SMB or enterprise which still has on-premise legacy infrastructure, should strongly consider colocation. For CIOs who don’t know exactly what’s on their premises, an audit can help to simplify the roadmap to optimal cloud deployment. Any organisation with complex distributed environments or an imperative to bolster their disaster recovery strategy will also benefit from plotting where all workloads reside: ensuring that it’s safe and secure with the physical workloads colocated right next to their cloud based workloads.
For further information about building secure and resilient hybrid cloud environment that enables business strategy connect with a NEXTDC colocation specialist.