Positive Neutrality: Outsourcing Simplified

As organisations store increasingly large amounts of data, and more applications are placed in the cloud, the need for data centre space has increased significantly. As a result, many businesses today are left wondering how best to satisfy these needs.

Gartner estimates that many data centres will reach full floor space capacity sometime in the next 12 to 36 months, forcing businesses to consider the value of potentially huge investments to create new data centres. According to Gartner, many organisations will simply not view such an investment as sufficiently strategic and instead will look at hosting or outsourcing.

So why outsource?

There are a range of well-documented benefits associated with outsourcing data centre services, all of which result in an enormously compelling argument for their adoption. Most of the key benefits revolve around an easier and more cost-effective service - from deployment, to day-to-day running, to upgrading.

The cost of establishing and maintaining a data centre site can be enormous, especially for those businesses that wish to locate their services in and around cities - where the land and power alone can be frighteningly expensive or almost impossible to source.

Enterprises that outsource can also take advantage of the wealth of expertise that many vendors offer. Businesses recruiting and managing such expertise in-house would incur further costs and longer processes that significantly eat into budgets. Entrusting such critical services to a third party therefore makes sense - both in terms of cost and time.
Another significant factor that is sometimes overlooked is the ease of outsourcing. The stresses of building a data centre, of the everyday managing of a facility and the recruitment of relevant expertise can seriously take its toll on a company's resources. Outsourcing is, in many situations, a far more streamlined and efficient model for obtaining a business' required data centre services.

Pay-as-you-grow

Outsourced service providers can also offer a far more flexible model in terms of future growth and scalability. They can provision data centre space as and when it is needed, and do not have to charge for unused space - meaning that businesses do not have to make upfront assumptions about future growth levels.

This offers customers a far greater level of flexibility in terms of being able to match infrastructure and business needs at any given time. With the ability to meet urgent demand during busy periods and then quickly revert back to a normal service, customers can ensure they are only paying for the service they need.

This is hugely advantageous for firms with ambitious growth plans, freeing up the cash businesses would have had to spend on creating and enlarging their own data centre for alternative business needs.

Increased flexibility is particularly helpful now, while the economy is still recovering, as it is important to have the ability to scale both up and down. With restructuring, many firms will be looking to shrink before they can grow again.

The importance of a tailored service

In spite of the advantages listed above, individual vendors can fall down when it comes to meeting a customer's specific needs. Off the peg solutions from a single data centre provider may well be satisfactory for many businesses, and indeed genuinely meet their requirements, but they can also be disappointingly limited - whether it be paying for more bandwidth than you need at a particular time, compromising on location, or having to pay for more storage than you need - falling short of a truly customer-focused solution.

In today's complex market, a key differentiator for anyone offering data centre services has to be the ability to deliver a bespoke and unique service to customers. Focussing on the precise needs of a customer ensures a better service, a better relationship between provider and client, and fairer prices.

However, it's not easy for individual data centre providers to offer such tailored services to those customers that demand them. Instead they are usually only able to offer generic services, or just one part of an overall solution, forcing the customer to adopt a siloed solution from multiple vendors. In reality, there really is only one type of provider that can fully meet a client's requirements.

The vendor-neutral provider

By definition, neutral providers have the ability to offer customers a range of services from a range of vendors. This model can be extremely beneficial for customers, but only if the partnerships in place are the right ones.

Neutral service providers are in the ideal position to establish strategic alliances with market-leading vendors, building a portfolio of best-of-breed solutions that is able to service the needs of virtually any business - large or small. For example, a customer may wish to take data centre space from one company, a networking solution from a different company and servers from another. By going through a single managed services provider, this customer can have exactly what it wants, but it only has to go through the one company to get it. In other words, the vendor-neutral model goes a long way to removing the major headache of multi-vendor sourcing, or having to deal with a number of different suppliers for a number of products, offering instead a single point of contact for all data centre needs.

Customers can also benefit from a greater level of resilience by going to a neutral provider - which is doubly critical to so many businesses. For example, by taking advantage of split data centre sites - across two operators, in two different locations - firms can effectively mitigate the threat of costly outages. What's more, with today's advanced and reliable networking technologies, which deliver low latency connectivity and a reliable service, the practice of linking separate data centre sites no longer leads to diminished performance.

It's become clear that this model offers businesses a means of getting the best level of service from multiple data centre providers at a fraction of the cost and with significantly less administrative overhead. The breadth of choice and flexibility, as well as the option to change from one vendor to another through their existing provider is why more businesses are turning to vendor neutral service providers.

New streams of revenue for data centre operators

Not only does the vendor-neutral model carry business benefits for end users, it has also created a new way for data centre operators to reach prospects and streamlined customer service delivery. Managed service providers can handle all customer needs and customers services, effectively disconnecting the customer from the data centre operator. This allows the data centre operators to focus their time and efforts on what they do best - running and managing the data centre to ensure the provisioning of space, cooling and power.

On top of this, vendor-neutral providers indirectly draw in a significant amount of business for data centre operators. This additional stream of revenue for the operators can add significantly to their level of business, and helps to diversify their means of attracting new business - effectively adding another channel.

Conclusion

As we anticipate the already vast quantities of information to increase even further, and the demand for data centre services to increase with it, it becomes inevitable that the data centre industry will continue to flourish and see strong growth.

Without doubt, outsourcing in general has proven popular, mainly because it is cost-effective and flexible. But, the vendor-neutral model has taken this further, delivering even greater flexibility, choice and ease for customers; as well as new streams of revenue for data centre operators and service providers.

With the key benefits of the vendor-neutral model understood, and the demand for data centre services set to continue to grow rapidly, this model will undoubtedly continue to grow in popularity and will cement its place at the heart of provisioning data centre services.