Technology has changed the way we do business – everything from creating the paperless office to building social networks and as technology changes so should the enterprising business be ready to follow in order to maximise its global opportunities.
IT policy and strategy should be part of your company’s foundations but what about where you store and protect all of the data your business produces every day? What strategy do you have in place to ensure you’re getting the most from your data centre and can identify risks and protect against a data centre outage.
Thanks to integrated networks and diverse business systems most businesses wouldn’t be able to function in the event of a major data centre fail. Data centres aren’t just big investment in terms of space and cash – you need to invest time and energy into ensuring they run smoothly and are as flexible as your business in responding to change.
A data centre strategy isn’t only about managing risk either, it is a real opportunity to look at the way your business manages data. It can be an excellent tool for measuring productivity and success.
Here are three things every data centre strategy should consider:
- Be forward thinking; data centre design and management is big business because the technology that drives it is constantly being improved and developed. Therefore your data centre strategy must always be looking ahead at what a data centre may look like in 5 – 15 years’ time and design in processes and policy to ensure you stay up to date as technology advances. If you become a forward looking business in this way you are more likely to keep your data safe as well be cost-efficient and get the most value from your data centre
- Engage stakeholders; it is everyone’s responsibility to keep your business’ data safe. Just like it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure your health and safety and environmental policies are implemented and adhered to. Your data centre strategy then should have the buy in and support of your entire business and key stakeholders to make it practical to implement. In practice this could be as simple as cascading information about the strategy to employees to ensure they know how to safely work with data
- Be efficient; your Corporate Responsibility policy should definitely include the positive actions your business takes to protect the environment from its activities. Reducing energy use is probably a key element. Data centres use a lot of energy; everything from the systems themselves to the air conditioning keeping everything from burning out. In fact data centres can account for 35 – 40% of a company’s energy use so including efficiency measure in your data centre strategy is vital. Simple measures like switching your outdated cooling system to ITE Adiabatic Data Centre Cooling for example could save you both energy and money.. In fact a strategy that is willing to look at all the options is more likely to create a data centre that aligns itself to the needs of your business.