Datacentres evolve beyond disaster recovery

The use of third-party data centres for disaster recovery (DR) has received plenty of publicity in the last five years in the wake of power outages, network failures and virus attacks. However, the focus on DR has disguised a more significant trend towards broader use of datacentre hosts.

Even the term ‘disaster recovery’ is falling into misuse in favour of ‘business continuity’ as firms seek not only to retrieve data but also use failover capabilities to avoid any significant disruption to processes even in the event of extraordinary problems.

And having achieved that strategic objective, many are now going a step further and using their relationships with hosts to improve and add services. Datacentre providers have evolved to offer not just colocation facilities where cages of server equipment run by various customers sit side by side, but also managed services that reduce the burden on IT departments.

As many firms struggle to maintain best-practice and stay on the right side of a tide of corporate governance compliance mandates—all on strictly rationed IT budgets—they are increasingly leaning on third-parties to help them eliminate pain points that chew up valuable admin time.

Vast compute power at low cost using utility based pricing may be changing the economics as well as the look and feel of the modern datacentre but new levels of management complexity of core IT infrastructure and applications will continue to attract many firms to investigate services offered by third-party hosts.
 

This white paper shows how firms can work with third party datacentre suppliers to achieve business objectives.