THE EDGE
n the past, the on-premises,
enterprise data centre was the
heart of the IT organisation.
Today its importance and role
is increasingly diluted, if you use its legacy
responsibilities as a benchmark.
I
Similar to other operational functions of
an organisation, the role of the data centre
is rapidly transforming. But that does not
mean its strategic importance for business
is diminishing.
With the increasing migration of
applications to the cloud through SaaS,
PaaS and IaaS, the extent of workloads
hosted on premises are also in decline.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of
enterprises will have scaled down their
traditional data centres.
Data residency rules, an increasingly
distributed global workforce, network
latency, the Internet of Things and
the emergence of managed service
providers are some of the drivers for
migration of workloads out of the
traditional, on-premises data centre to
more suitable options. Historically, the
enterprise data centre used to address
challenges such as: how do we best
build the required infrastructure, in
terms of cost, time and performance?
While expectations from the traditional
data centre shrink in terms of size
of operations and IT spending, the
expectations from the modern and digital
data centre are rapidly increasing. The
primary role of the data centre head
is changing from being a builder and
manager of data centre functions to
becoming an enabler and collaborator for
the business to perform.
As business heads increasingly choose
to find more agile application and service
options outside the IT organisation, by
remaining steadfast on their traditional
roles, the legacy data centre faces
extinction. By transforming to becoming
an enabler of the business and playing
the role of broker and trusted adviser, the
function of the data centre has a purpose
in tomorrow’s digital organisations.
Transformation of the legacy data centre
into tomorrow’s multi-function diversified
role requires working on numerous fronts.
Firstly, the on-premises data centre
THE DATA CENTRE
OF THE PAST MAY
HAVE BEEN A
CUSTODIAN OF
INFRASTRUCTURE
BUT, GOING
FORWARD, IT
WILL NEED TO
PLAY THE ROLE
OF A PROVIDER
OF LEADING-
EDGE SERVICES
FOR ENHANCED
DIGITAL BUSINESS
PERFORMANCE.
needs to be highly agile and responsive to
meet internal demands. It needs to build
a hybrid cloud delivery model, bench-
marked using the best industry standards.
Today the demand has transformed to:
how do we best place the workload in
terms of agility and business benefits? Secondly, it needs to attract and retain the
best skills to manage internal expectations
of delivering on machine language,
Artificial Intelligence, business analytics
and insights, amongst others.
The on-premises legacy data centre is
increasingly shrinking and becoming
centralised to manage mission critical
workloads with a higher degree of
oversight, control and responsibility than is
available through externally placed options. Finally, and most importantly, it needs
to help businesses to compete and
differentiate in the fast-emerging digital
marketplace, taking on born-in-the-cloud,
pure play start-ups and other digital
juggernauts. The story of the future data
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Sachin Bhardwaj, Director Marketing and
Business Development, eHosting DataFort
Issue 09
69