Reasons For The Popularity Of Datacenter Outsourcing

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Data centers are the most critical infrastructure of any organization as it is where the company’s most critical and sensitive information stored. Until recently, every organization owned a data center of its own but today most companies have a different take on this. Let’ see what it is and try to understand the factors that brought about this sudden change in the attitude.

Environmental Factors
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), data centers are a major source of energy consumption in the United States. The Uptime Institute estimates that CO2 emissions from datacenters will quadruple between 2010 and 2020. As per their estimates, the annual global datacenter CO2 emissions are on par with the CO2 emissions of the airline industry of entire countries. The IT industry accounts for more than 2 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. Moreover, the cause for 50 percent of an average air-cooled data center’s energy consumption and carbon footprint is not computing as generally believed. It is actually caused by the energy required for powering the necessary cooling ...
... systems to keep the processors from overheating. Carbon footprint is a ticking time bomb that would explode one day.

Cost Factors
For any company the most expensive investment in infrastructure is data center facilities. The following are some import requirements of a data center.
Uninterruptible power supply (“UPS”) systems, battery banks, diesel generators and carrier neutral network connections
Low voltage cable routing
Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (“HVAC”) systems to maintain temperature and humidity within strict limits
Fire control systems such as early warning smoke detectors, dry-pipe sprinkler systems, clean agent fire suppression gaseous systems, firewalls, fireproof vaults and so on
24 x 7 x 365 NOC & facilities staff to provide high security externally and internally
Physical security devices such as video camera surveillance, cards, biometric systems, and so on

Besides infrastructure costs, there are real estate costs, power costs, maintenance costs, security costs, break/fix costs that companies need to worry about.

Government Regulation Factors
In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the California state government passed the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 or Assembly Bill (AB) 32. As per this law, regulations were developed to reduce emissions to 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Similar such laws were passed in other countries.

All these factors encouraged IT companies all over the world to choose datacenter outsourcing over in-house datacenters. An important advantage of datacenter outsourcing is that companies can choose from any of its services, which include shared hosting services, firewall services, managed servers, dedicated hosting services, storage networks, and disaster recovery services.