How Outsourcing Data Center Operations Can Boost Your Business?

Many reports have often suggested that 99% of businesses fail in the first two quarters because of ill planning and lack of visibility. Surprisingly, businesses don’t fail when they have a dearth of work; businesses face a nose dive when they start growing! Yes, it’s the growth that companies are unable to manage and they lose their brand value before building a brand of their own. Can say, death via negative branding!

Now if we look deeper into the cause – effect equation, this failure happens because most the companies, during the inception mode, try to do everything on their own (both core and non-core operations). As they scale up, they are unable to manage the non-core, time consuming elements stunting seamless business service. These issues of not prioritizing operational elements take the growing organizations from sunlight to darkest ally of spiral failures. 

One of the elements (unless it is the core operations of an organization) that takes up a lot of time for any growing organization is managing the data and data related services. Every business today leverages IT in one way or the other. IT is no more an enabler but a close partner for every business. Today, a CTO sits next to CEO when it comes to formulating innovative strategies. 

According to a recent survey of Fortune 500 companies by Forbes, most IT leaders evaluate and implement the option of outsourced data centers over in-house operation.

So what are top 5 reasons companies choose to outsource their operations to datacenter and at times, dedicated server hosting:

Reason 1: Guaranteed Uptime, every time!

It is important to note that outsourced datacenter services come with a sheer responsibility of services providers. The services are governed by service level agreements (SLAs) that held service providers answerable for all the environmental and infrastructure elements. The SLAs include unsaid commitments to state-of-the-art building systems and designs, maintained at the industry best standards level to reduce downtime and subsequent financial penalties.

According to Gartner, the average recovery time for total data center outage is 134 minutes which no startup business running its own datacenter can commit. Outsourcing thus becomes the best option.

Reason 2 –Low on CapEx, Boosts Branding!

Data center outsourcing has been a prominent choice of startup and growing businesses as it gives leverage of moving the high CapEx requirement to low OpEx. This indeed comes with flexibility to expand the need at any hour of the day/ night ensuring consistent business value delivery.

CapEX to OpEX, agreed! How it effects branding? Rather how it boosts branding?

With adoption of world class data center services, in fact dedicated hosting; your clients are assured of your sound decision making. This doesn’t end here as you may also attract investor confidence and higher motivation of employees in your growth plans. A well thought-out service level agreement and outsourcing partnership, one can assure long-term solid foundation for futuristic growth plans for the business.

Reason 3 - Creating Distances for Risk Mitigation

Data center helps companies to mitigate by ensuring adequate distance between a company’s headquarters and its production data center. Uncertain business disruptive events such as utility blackout or the occurrence of a natural disaster can be mitigated in comparatively small turnaround time. It is though important to take into account the latency in response for applications in the data center and between. No wonder we are seeing smaller and robust data center hubs and colocation facilities in key markets catering high quality inventory to mitigate risks.

Reason 4 - Increased Focus, core business!

Building a new datacenter or upgrading an existing is not an easy task and can take anywhere up to 2 years or more. The business agility definitely gets impact as a critical amount of resources is being spent to build up a data center/ dedicated hosting. This doesn’t end here and despite building a state-of-art data center, business heads may end up scratching heads to deal with under-utilization of capacities of in-house datacenters. When it comes to an outsourced data center model, the troubles of upgrading IT infrastructure and building systems are shifted to the outsourced data service provider. Enabling the CIOs and IT managers focus more on important activities contributing to business goals.

Reason 5 - Regulatory Compliance and Audits, all managed!

With industry standards upgrading very often, there has been a constant increase in technical and regulatory pressures impacting business infrastructure in most organizations. Outsourced data center model ensures compliance and audit capabilities to meet the SSAE16 standards, the health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) and many other government regulations. It is very difficult for a growing company to invest and maintain these standards (where it would need to employ dedicated staff for regulatory control management).

So, where are we heading?

As per Gartner report published early this year, the data center outsourcing market in India is growing at a rate of 25-30%. With this, the third party data center is expected to grow at a rate of 80% in the coming years.  Innovative business ideas may want to take utmost advantage of dynamic market environment. In such scenarios, improved connectivity and latency are two key elements for growth. Datacenters are an answer to this growing need!

Why should you build your own server?

For any budding startup, it’s a great choice to lease server equipment from a shared hosting service / data center when your main focus is in making sales and not achieving operational efficiency. Infact, when you are focused on your core business areas, you are fine to pay through the nose even for technology that is on the downside of innovation curve. What do you get? A great peace of mind in an outsourced server technology solution!

The scenario changes when you are no more in the league of startup per say. At some point of time, your CTO may start wondering that why would you want to pay for that same 4GB of RAM every month for life. And then you may want to ponder if it is a right time to start investing in your own server ecosystem, especially when your company has grown to a decent level of process maturity and operations volume.

Let’s see how it maps to your spend numbers. If we project the cost we are paying on a monthly basis and you cost out your core business services IT operations for 3 years, you may realize that you may end up paying almost the same and in some cases even more than the cost to purchase the hardware outright (considering a gradual upscale in your operations volume). So based on where you are currently standing in terms of operations and market growth, you may think of opting the implementation of your own servers or colocations.

After working with a sound hardware partner for first few years of your startup, you may want to think many a times the pros and cons of investing in your own server infrastructure. Here are a few benefits of building your own server that you may want to consider:

1.         You own the data, completely!

One of the basic issues of using cloud space to store your data is security.Your data is not exactly your data as the cloud owners have almost complete access to your data. Your files are ultimately stored on their servers, so on a day to day basis, you are virtually blind folded on what is happening to your data.Though on the other side, there are various preventive methods to project your data via different ways of encryption technologies, still the storage location stays the same. By using your servers and ensuring good security, you can at least be assured that your business critical data is well intact in your hands.

2. Your demand, your services, sheer flexibility!

With your own server, you have the comfort to modify any service or add any new service based on changing demands of business operations. You can run an email server to handle all your email, a proxy, FTP server, and many other combinations at the same time and you won’t have to worry about any limitations as are there in the shared services. In fact, you can even create your own instance of popular applications like Dropbox, Wordpress and open source utilities and create your very own services with the flavors you are used to. Thus, flexibility to the core!

3. Significantly greater performance of services!

Well this point is certainly subjective to the expertise in server management in your organization to handle server performance but there is definitely a good chance for you to optimize the performance of your servers any time based on the priority of the services. When it comes to shared services, there is a window period to cater the request made to change in priority of business services you are operating on cloud. If you have the right skill set employed with you, you can switch the priorities based on dynamic business demands.

Definitely there are scenarios like hardware failure, natural disaster, physical security breach etc. leading to disruption of service resulting in longer down time when you are using your own servers. But again as mentioned, this model may work considering the appropriate economy of scale. While third party services may get to change the way their services or products work, your own services won’t change and hence there won’t be many factors related to performance that would be out of your control. It’s like my-server-my-choice kind of ease.

4. Extensive possibility of scalability via server consolidation!

If you are not sure of the concept of server consolidation, it is the approach to utilize computer server resources efficiently in order to reduce the total number of servers or server locations that an organization requires. In many companies servers typically run at 15-20% of their capacity during parts of the day, which may not be a sustainable ratio in the current economic environment. The practice is thus the extension of parallel processing to mitigate the problem of server sprawl where multiple, under-utilized servers take up more space and consume more resources than can be justified by their workload.

Although consolidation can increase the efficiency of server resources substantially, it involves a complex set of configurations of data, applications, and servers that can be challenging to the average IT person and may require a more specialized skilled team.

Server consolidation can help you reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50 percent and energy costs by as much as 80 percent.

5. Increased flexibility with a hybrid model!

While considering the complexities of using your own server environment, you may be wondering about a solution that covers the challenges of environment complexities, yet you could achieve cost reduction and greater efficiencies. 

Perhaps a hybrid model makes sense? A model where you could service your core, known workloads with dedicated servers and connect to the public cloud for added flexibility. Many data centers today offer direct connect services for this very reason.  No wonder you may want to test the waters first before going live on a completely owned server infrastructure.

So what’s the take-away? 

It will take some consideration to take the right step

Running your own server brings many advantages that could bring visible changes in your balance sheets and may make your business life a lot easier at many areas. The complexities, though, need a careful judgement. Before starting the journey on the new road you may want to chalk out your business services which are heavily infrastructure dependent and prioritize them for any transition accordingly. In the end, it should be well worth it, with a spare box well used in case of any plans to roll back. Bottom line, business operations first!

Threats To Business Without A Dependable Server Hosting Company

What defines Dependable Dedicated Server Hosting Company?

Good, reliable, true, honest, safe, secure, steady-going, rock-steady are all synonyms of dependable. Instead of going on and on about what is dependable and how a superlatively dependable hosting company adds value to your business, we give the liberty to you the reader, to grasp the obvious. Let’s better focus on the element of risk which an unreliable hosting agency attracts.

Threats without Dependable Hosting Company

In current times data is being created and consumed everywhere. To give you a perspective 72 hours of YouTube videos gets uploaded every minute. Be it financial transaction, business email, a simple Facebook post, online shopping, every transaction gets recorded and stored, creating data. All this data requires to be secured, let alone misused even losing data to viruses or malwares is unacceptable.

Data integrity and security is under constant risk from outside attempts of theft and also from internal users. Internal users can also willingly compromise data for personal gains. The three fundamental aspects of data security are confidentiality (data privacy, authentication of users), integrity (safekeeping data) and availability (authorized use). Meeting these security standard poses a tough challenge for hosting companies.

Client is connected to server, and the server in turn is connected to the internet, defining the network as depicted in the image below. Data is flowing through these channels. And servers are vulnerable to malware or virus attacks.  

Consider the following Breaches

• A server gets DDoS Distributed Denial of Service attack breaching firewall; nobody including the administrator can access the data on servers.

• A server gets hacked and is then used to send spam emails; the email service provider blocks the particular DNS server. Hence all users including the legitimate ones on this particular server are refrained from sending emails.

These are nightmares to hosting companies but thanks to some hard to breach firewalls keeping such attacks at bay. It is clear that good hosting companies not just host data, they ensure it is secure, accessible and is in safe hands.

What do the threats mean exactly?

Think of a person using a bank locker to keep his valuables safe.  The bank locker room has a number of lockers used by different individuals and the onus lies on banks to secure each one of them. There are pre-defined safety protocols which ensure a user can only access his own locker and not others. This requires the bank in its capacity as a safe-keeper to render best security measures. Will a person use the services of a bank incapable of safeguarding its valuables? I bet the answer would be a big No. Similar is the case with Data Hosted on a Data Center or a Hosting Company’s servers. The above analogy draws comparisons between the roles of Hosting companies to that of a bank. It is imperative that a server hosting services Provider Company should be dependable.

Physical Risk: This is the risk of having stored data at a third party server whose physical whereabouts and security are not in your control. This threat can be mitigated by deploying 24x7 Physical Security, video surveillance, restricted access & biometric access to protect your data.

Failure Risk: This is a business risk. Ideally a server should yield 100% runtime and issues should get resolved in real-time without stopping it.

To overcome this risk, it is crucial to have a team of professionals dedicated to continuously troubleshoot issues.

A dependable server Hosting company meets these requirements, user expectations and achieves excellence through them. It’s not a question of should’s, but it is all about must’s.That’s what being dependable entails.

The success of your business and the kind of user experience you are able to render to your customers, to a great extent, depends on the kind of server hosting company you choose. Select a company based on infrastructure and the kind of Support they are ready to provide in case of downtimes and any contingency.  

Five ways Data Center Park Will Change India

Data Centers are practically power houses. They guard your data, they store and protect your data. The scalability of your website and user experience depend on servers stored in data centers. More and more companies are switching to data centers instead of server hosting companies for more reliability. There are numerous datacenters spread all across the globe and they are all interconnected through the web of internet. To be precise, there are around 20 in India out of which only about 5 are really to say ‘public’ data centers where any type of business can store its data. The rest of them are company specific ones, not meant for outsiders. A data center can host data which is accessible across the globe. But high traffic, low latency at greater distances, low cost region location makes it preferable to have datacenters in proximity to the place where a lot of users reside. For example- A website with a great chunk of user base in France would prefer having datacenter near to or in France. India also needs to be prepared to face the influx of mobile data consumption whose speed mainly relies on the proximity of mobiles to datacenters. 

A majority of companies in India still prefer data center companies abroad. While this may pose a national data security threat in future, it also gives foreign companies a chance to charge exorbitantly. The gap of trust in data centers has been largely due to the lack of data center parks in India. Good news is India’s first Data Center Park is being built in Betma, near Indore, Madhya Pradesh. The Park is spread across a sprawling 100 acres. The government has already proposed to invest Rs 150 Crore into the DCP project. In fact, MP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has welcomed the project with open arms and has called it a ‘dream project’. 

DATA CENTER PARK FACTS

·         The park is spread across 100 acres of land.

·         The state govt. has promised to invest 150 crores in the Data Center Park.

·         DCP is launched with the vision to cater to Cloud Computing Services.

·         Objective is to put India on Global Map.

·         The DCP will bring down data storage costs for Indian IT firms.

This is a big move from the point of view of IT investment. So how exactly would the Data Center Park change India? Here’s how:

1.            Redefining Data Security:  A study conducted by Abror Networks suggests that Distributed denial of service (DDoS)  attacks have increased and become more powerful. Spamphus at 300Gbps was the largest DDoS attack tracked under the study. Security is the one of the topmost concerns for any organization storing data. We have websites in India which have data hosted on Servers located on foreign lands. It is a given that all necessary precautions like firewall safety must be in place to check attempts of hacking into servers. In the age of political snooping, there is still a chance that Nations might use sensitive data against each other. In cloud computing,  location of data is crucial as data stored in a foreign country is subject to the law of that country when it comes to litigation of any kind. Thus, as a necessary precaution it is better to store data within the country rather than depending upon foreign locations. India thus finally has an answer to security concerns in the form of a Data Center Parks where requisite infrastructure would encourage Indian companies to open their own data centers, so that India’s data would remain in India. A data center park in India – the world’s second largest populated country and one of the biggest economies – will certain redefine data security standards worldwide.

2.            Goldmine of Jobs: Opening a Data Center Park in our homeland will undoubtedly create a plethora of jobs. India needs to ‘Make in India’; having its own Data Center Park will boost economic growth, contributing significantly to ITES sector. In isolation a datacenter park might just look like any other business providing a handful of jobs but when looked in terms of a facilitator for other business to run, it has huge impact. From research and development to sales and marketing, a data center is the physical incarnation to whatever happens on digital platform.

3.            Proliferating Technology Start-ups: Projections state that at current pace the number of start-up is expected to be 11,500 by 2020. (Source Nasscom) The availability of Data centers inside the Data Center Park will open lot many allied IT enabled services to be viable for small and mid-sized businesses. Opportunities will be in forefront in terms of new product innovation as the supply will drive demand. Add to that the fact by 2017, the percentage of workloads migrating to cloud will increase by 500%.  This will also ensure Software as a Service (SaaS) industry to entrench its roots deeper with increased penetration driven by better IT infrastructure available at home. India shall become a hub of these services as soon as the Data Center Park is completed. Cloud would become the next big thing in India.

4.            A whole new competitive pricing: Study conducted by Equinix quizzed 441 Tech Managers and found that 34% find Data Centers Costly. There is a thus huge gap between expectations and data storage solutions available worldwide. The industry is maturing towards wanting affordable data storage solution. India currently has 3100 Tech Start-ups of which about 800 have come into existence in 2014. India needs strong infrastructure to support such an ecosystem. Economies of scale, economies of scope and maturity of IT industry supported by favorable government policies will lower the costs for tech start-ups over a period of time. Also, free market ascertains that the end user is destined to benefit as competition increases. Take for instance a home grown ecommerce website; basically a Startup which has grown multiple folds thus now has increased data needs. With the presence of local datacenters the cost of storing data would be a fraction of what it would have paid for storing data at foreign server destinations. Low costs will shape the future of Indian IT industry. The Data Center Park would provide the requisite infrastructure for hosting several data centers. More competition would mean competitive pricing. 

5.            India as not only IT Outsourcing Hub but IT infrastructure hub:By 2020, at least 80% of IT industry growth would be driven by cloud and modern IT Solutions; predicts Nasscom on the emergence of Cloud computing. Moreover, migration to cloud storage has been increasing at an extremely fast pace. Presently, India is considered the land of 3 million IT professionals.  Most of it is involved in serving offshore clients. Sooner or later, almost every IT company would switch to cloud. A strong IT infrastructure will give rise to India as not only IT outsourcing hub but also IT infrastructure hub. Affordable, home grown datacenters with world class architecture to support every possible data storage need will attract foreign companies looking for data storage needs. 

For more detail you can visit these blog:

http://www.arbornetworks.com/corporate/blog/4855-q1-key-findings-from-atlas

http://www.nasscom.in/tech-startups-india-bright-future