With your fast growing business and its physical data storage space running out, are you ready for the next big step? Deciding whether your business needs a data center or not is a difficult as well as one of the most important decisions for your business’ growth. This also involves huge investment, not only in terms of money but also your time and efforts.
To make this process easier for you, I’ve compiled a set of pointers that’ll help you evaluate your needs well and decide whether you really need a data center and why should you build one instead of buying one. Check them out:
1. Is This the First Time You’re Building a Data Center?
If it’s not the first time you’re building a data center for your organization, then you probably know about the factors to consider before building one and the crucial steps to be taken before and after the design and build processes. You probably also have a good relationship with one or more data center design and implementation solutions providing companies. But if it is the first time, you have to be prepared to go through an extensive consideration related to the data center space, cooling, energy, and more.
2. What Regulations Do You Have to Comply To?
For building a data center for your firm, you need to have an understanding of your operational regulatory environment. This differs as per the nature and operations of your business and the location of your company. Also, make sure that your data center design and build service provider knows about and complies with all the regulations that you have to abide to.
3. Do You Need Complete Access and Control Over Your Data?
When you outsource your data center, you have limited access to and control over your data, its security, and factors like cooling, space, and energy consumption. If your business belongs to a data-sensitive industry like banking, healthcare, or educational institution, then you can’t risk the security of your data and it is best to invest in building a data center infrastructure of your own. This way you’ll have full control over your data, also ensuring its security.
4. Does Your Organization Have the Experience of Operating a Data Center?
If your organization has had a data center before, then you know about the workflow and processes that are specific to a data center’s operational environment. If not, then you need to have a dedicated team to learn about the basic operations of a data center first, like – Infrastructure operations, security, connectivity, power, cooling, and management.
5. What is the Cost of Building a Data Center and Its downtime?
Building a data center of your own is a major investment. Moreover, data center downtime are costly too, so considering not only the cost of design and installation, but also the cost of its downtime after implementation is paramount to your decision making process.
“According to a new study conducted by Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power, the average cost of a data center outage has steadily increased from $505,502 in 2010 to $740,357 in 2016.”
(Source: Planetaklimata)
So, consider the above questions to evaluate your business needs to know whether you need a data center or not. Discussing and brainstorming each of the above point with your team would be a great idea and will drive you towards taking a better decision.
Need help with data center need evaluation? Connect with the experts at Prasa Infocom & Power Solutions
We provide the most reliable data center consultancy, solutions, services, and products. We are a dedicated team of full-fledged data center consultants, engineers, and design experts that offer data center and other mission-critical infrastructure services for all your business needs.
