TECHNOLOGY
Going cloud addressing the data centre dilemma By Roelof Louw, Cloud Expert at T-Systems in South Af rica
which require information to be stored within the country, and security concerns. Fur ther adding to the conundrum is the question of whether to outsource data centre facilities to a hosted provider, attempt to leverage the investment of an existing data centre, or invest in building a new, purpose-built data centre for cloud solutions. Addressing this data centre dilemma requires careful consideration of legalities, organisational requirements, and existing infrastructure, so that the most appropriate and cost-ef fective option can be selected for cloud solutions going for ward.
Many organisations are acknowledging the benefits of migrating to the cloud and are seeing their competitors either considering this option or having already made the move. For small medium enterprises (SMEs), the decision is easy as the path to migrate is less onerous and considerably less complex. However, larger organisations have additional considerations to factor in such as compliance issues,
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In South Africa, the uptake of cloud solutions is generally slower than seen in America and Europe. However, following global trends, SMEs have been quicker to adopt cloud solutions, as a result of the fact that they are geared towards faster adoption and are subject to fewer restrictions from auditor y and compliance bodies. Within larger corporates, they not only have securit y and compliance barriers to contend with but the data centre is also a significant consideration. Corporates need to make the decision on utilising existing data centre infrastructure or taking the hosted route, and this decision can impact the adoption of cloud ser vices. > Many large organisations have already invested heavily into data centre infrastructure. However, when it comes to leveraging existing infrastructure for the purposes of cloud solutions, there are several
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challenges. This legacy investment and infrastructure was designed and built for a computing environment that is ver y dif ferent from the one necessar y to suppor t the cloud. Data centre environments for the cloud of ten require ver y dense storage arrays, which existing centres may not have, and which also require more advanced cooling and heat dissipation as a result of increased densit y. Added to this is a growing awareness of the need for improved energy ef ficiency, both to meet global environmentally friendly requirements and to counter ever-increasing energy bills. Utilising an existing data centre for cloud purposes may require ex tensive and costly renovations and upgrades, so the benefit of leveraging this investment can be somewhat diluted by the need to cater to a high-densit y cloud environment. One option for organisations in this instance is to sell their data centre to a ser vice provider, who can then upgrade it as necessar y and of fer hosted ser vices out of the centre, improving cost-ef fectiveness of ser vices. Another option for organisations is to build their own, purpose-designed cloud-ready data centre. Although this may be a costly exercise, there are some applications where this expense is warranted, and the data centre will be able to leverage economies of scale to justif y costs. For example, large multinational banking organisations with branches and of fices all over the countr y are legally required to maintain their own data, and also have the scale to justif y this cost. Building their own