Managing Small Data Centres First published: September 2007

  To remain competitive and grow, businesses need to be responsive to the needs of their customers and seek new markets
Customers, whether businesses or consumers, have come to expect continuously available services from suppliers. In turn suppliers aspire to serve broader geographic markets

  The ability to provide continuously available services is under-pinned by IT applications that today are critical to many businesses operations
If these applications become unavailable through poor management or component failure, or if data is lost or compromised, the business suffers and customer loyalty is impacted and reputation damaged

 

  For many mid-sized businesses (typically those from 200 to 2,000 employees) this can be a huge challenge
Managing IT is not their core competence, getting sufficient expertise in-house is hard and expensive and building enterprise class data centres is impractical

  But it can be affordable. 3rd parties can offer enterprise class data centre facilities
Such facilities have physical security levels beyond those of most enterprises, they have robust defences against fire, flood and other disasters, backup power supplies, they are adjacent to internet backbones and the extra security of a backup failover system is possible through the use of more than one location

  However, if a poorly managed sound data centre facility is not enough, in-house or outsourced, good IT management is a fundamental requirement
This includes mundane tasks like asset management, backup and recovery, as well as the ability to minimise and cope with emergencies such as security alerts or disk crashes

  To help with this, many mid-sized businesses are turning to managed service providers (MSPs)
Through economies of scale MSPs can invest in enterprise class management tools and expertise to make sure the business applications they rely on to serve their customers remain available, all day every day