I have long maintained that owning and/or running your own data centre, as a technology reseller, managed service provider or solutions provider, is a risky business.

Sure, you maintain ultimate “control” over the infrastructure. Certainly, to begin with, you can sell it at a competitive price. But can you really expect to compete with the resiliency, scalability, ultimate cost and security of the bigger players?

And if you do choose to run your own datacentre, with GDPR coming into force, there is a whole raft of questions you need to be asking yourself. What data are you holding? How long for? Why? What is your breach detection and notification policy? And so on…

Look to the sky

You only have to look at recent announcements from Symantec and Daisy who have just publicly declared they are “winding down” their data centres, choosing not to invest millions into ever-depreciating hardware. Instead, they plan to migrate these services to platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services or focus on colocation.

It was only back in July of this year when I sat on stage with John Coulston and listened to Rackspace announce they had just shifted their entire business into selling Azure as opposed to their own infrastructure (becoming their no 1 partner in the process).

5 things businesses need to check before moving to the cloud

With the above in mind, today more than ever, clients need to check the pedigree of the “cloud” solution they are buying into. They need to understand:

• Security – check the security certifications the solution has and, if possible, go and visit the facility in which it resides.
• Resiliency – what would happen if the solution went down – in REAL terms, how quickly would you be back online?
• Scalability – how scalable is the solution they have?
• Performance – what are the guaranteed performance metrics? Just because the solution is running fast now, as the providers equipment ages, do they guarantee the performance of the platform later?
• Exit strategy – most importantly, how can you get your data back if things do not work out with your provider? Plan for the worst.

Summary

As technology resellers, Utilize never manufactured its own PCs. That wasn’t our skill set. Our skill set was to build technology solutions that worked, fusing together best-of-breed vendor technology and making it work for businesses. We weren’t concerned with getting out our soldering irons, making circuit boards or trying to get a specific graphics card to work in a specific custom-made PC chassis. Instead, we left that to the experts – the PC and Server manufacturers who did this most efficiently, reliably and at scale. The Dells, the HPs and IBMs of this world.

So what would make us think we can suddenly compete with the big data centre and infrastructure providers of this world and build our own? The reality is the “build your own data centre” ship has sailed and we, as always, are resellers of the “chosen” vendors.

The fact is our role is more important than ever in this increasingly diverse industry with its myriad of solutions. Utilize has always existed to ensure technology works for its clients, so we continue to evaluate, select and work with the best products and services from all available vendors.

To give every client the technology to succeed.