CBTS

Every business, regardless of size or industry, has three primary components; core competency, financial, and operations. Likewise, every corporation has a need to protect one of their most valuable assets - their corporate data. This article is tailored to focus on the relationship between these components and the protection of this valuable asset, your data. Regarding this topic, it is certain that: (1) every business is exploding with data, (2) data is critical to the core business and (3) data storage and access requirements will continue to grow at a neat exponential curve with no end in sight.

The question then, is how should your asset be stored?  The answer - put it in a safe; which in this case happens to be a quality data center with proven and tested operational processes to ensure access.  However, the data must remain available upon request.  It is of little consequence if the data is secure but inaccessible.  To this end, data availability requires two key components.  The first is to keep your compute infrastructure "light's blinking" (systems have power, power remains available, and they are environmentally controlled).  The second is to ensure network communications can retrieve or archive the data upon request.  There are other factors such as disaster recovery, logical security, data archival strategies, etc. to be considering.  These items are out of scope for this article, but very important to your overall data protection and facility strategy.  Therefore, the remainder of this article is to focus on the three business components and its relation on owning, managing, and supporting your own data center.

Your Business' Core - this component is the answer to one simple question: why are you in business?  I would be surprised if you answered, to build and manage a data center; unless of course you are in the business of data centers, as we are, of whole-sale data center, data center colocation and hosting.  The next question that then extends from the first is: how much mindshare do I want my employees to spend on the data center?  Before answering, you might want to consider the gravity of the answer.  We will discuss some of the "baggage" that comes along with building, owning, and operating a data center.  Data facilities are no longer in the back-office of the business and have moved to catch the attention of front office individuals with titles like President, CEO, and CFO.

Your Business' Finances - At the end of the day, you must admit, the world is controlled by finances.  Finances are why we work (to pay our obligations), why we are in business (to make money for owners/shareholders), and to pay taxes (for the country's financial wellbeing).  Even the acronym above is C-F-O (core-financial-operations).  To construct a data center, one must weigh the financial burden placed on the corporation; not only from a capital expenditure view, but also the operating expenditure side.  Before the data center is operational, I've heard many horror stories in working with potential customers over the past decade.  Many of these involve exploited capital budgets, such as, over budgeting, delayed timelines, overbuilding the data center or the reverse of under building for future capabilities.   In this tough capital availability economic time, most companies have set the laser point on the wall to focus investments into strategic investments to grow their business.  Furthermore, operating expenses need to be considered carefully while preparing the budget for the lifecycle of the data center facility.  Many budgets I've reviewed are void of operating expense items.  In addition to depreciating the data center infrastructure assets over a 10 - 15 year lifecycle, data center facility engineers, insurance, taxes, audits (HIPAA and SAS70), physical security, site maintenance, repair and maintenance, specialized cleaning, diesel fuel, etc. must be included in the analysis. Depending upon the facility, complexity, and availability requirements, these expenses approach 50% - 75% of your construction budget over the next five to seven years.  This number does not take into account your expense for miscellaneous capital requirements to maintain building management systems, fire suppression systems, and facility management.

Your Business' Operations - Hopefully the majority of your operations is centered on your core business.  Typically, the more a business has in its operation's expense, the less profitability it is returning to the owners/shareholders of the company.  It is much less of a burden on a company to manage to service level agreements and less on the actual management of the data center, which is not very core to the core business.  In the hierarchy, managing the data center is an enabling work effort to manage the compute/data storage, which is an enabling work effort to protect the corporate data.  I would propose that if any business operation's work efforts are three times removed from the actual value to the corporation, it is highly inefficient. 

The moral of the story is that I believe you owe it to yourself before engaging in a data center facility project (either revamping your current facility or building new), that your business should perform a true calculation between a colocation strategy or the capital/operating expenses for the next 12 years, plus the impact to offloaded mindshare for the 12 - 18 months to embark on an internal project.  For many corporations, big and small, there is likely more risk in protecting your data and keeping it available in a do-it-yourself model.  Unfortunately, many corporations I've spoken to over the last year had vastly understated the capital budget, exceeded timelines, and the corporation ended up wishing they had the capital to invest in the profit making business.  There are options for corporations in this predicament, but they usually involve a sale-leaseback strategy.  However, at this point you've lost the spent mindshare, time, and competitive advantage if the capital was invested in the "core" 18 months earlier.