Would your rather keep your data center onsite or house it in a remote location? After considering logistical, legal, and financial implications, the issue may seem pretty complicated. But for small- to medium-sized businesses, the decision should be clearcut.
Onsite server rooms
The major advantage of maintaining your own data center is...it’s yours. You have the freedom to modify and manage your facility on your own terms, allowing you to resolve diverse, company-specific problems. You can also shave seconds off application loading times since the distance between the data center and the workstation is so short.
The downside of installing your own server room, however, is the same as it’s benefit. All of the IT responsibility, deployment, and maintenance falls on you and your in-house technicians -- if you have any, of course. For many businesses, the best strategic decision is to devote the largest amount of resources behind activities that directly relate to their core competencies - dedicating capital and headcount to maintaining an onsite data center may divert investments away from parts of the business that can facilitate revenue growth.
Like stashing your money under the mattress, onsite data centers only give you the illusion of security. You know it’s there, but when fires, floods, hurricanes, and thefts occur, you can end up losing everything with no recourse for recovery.
And then there’s the cost. The installation alone is a significant cost, and you pay for utilities all the time -- regardless of whether it’s running at peak capacity or at 50 percent. In fact, keeping those server racks powered up and cooled to acceptable temperatures may exceed the cost of hardware within a year of installation. The bottom line is that an onsite data center is expensive, unsecure and requires more effort to maintain than it’s worth.
Offsite data centers
By entrusting your data to a managed services provider, you are far less likely to experience network outages. Offsite data storage grants you access to a team of IT consultants, automated updates, and redundant backup systems to keep your systems online -- without any extra effort on your part.
The ‘per user per month’ subscription investment is usually much smaller compared to the thousands of dollars that need to be spent on hardware and utilities for an onsite data center. This means no complex cabling, server installations, maintenance, and extensive power and cooling requirements to worry about. All you need is a stable internet connection.
Enterprise-level computing capacity is also quite difficult to come by if you plan on housing servers onsite. In contrast, the economies of scale afforded to high-end data centers allows providers to price their services at levels that are realistic for companies of all sizes.
As a business owner, you face a lot of tough IT decisions. Choosing between an onsite or offsite data center, however, is not one of them. Local data centers have far too many drawbacks, while the fast deployment and versatility of a remote IT infrastructure is a deal that’s too good to pass up.
What reasons do you believe an offsite data center is the better solution?
If you’re considering migrating to an offsite data center, IntelligISTM is here to help - we’ve helped many companies reduced their total cost of ownership with highly secure, affordable data center solutions. To start the conversation, visit us at www.intelligis.com.
