Moving into the cloud brings with it a host of distinct advantages that can’t be ignored, both in terms of mobile application developers and the customers that they’re trying to serve. It is now possible for teams to work anywhere, in any way, at any time. The long-term storage of data becomes more economical and more efficient. Virtualization techniques allow businesses to extend the lifetime of their existing assets, increasing return on investment at the same time. The list goes on and on.
But many people don’t realize that without the modern data center functioning as both the heartbeat and the nerve center of all cloud-based architectures, none of these benefits would even be remotely possible. There’s a reason why data center construction across the United States is expected to grow about 21% between now and the end of 2018 – data centers are massive sources of disruption in the best possible way, changing the way we do business for all time and for the better.
There are a wide range of different reasons why the modern data center is the foundation of your entire operation that are more than worth exploring.
The Tangible Costs of Downtime: The Story Beneath the Numbers
When your customers begin to experiment with moving their mission-critical workloads into a virtual private cloud environment, obviously the major concerns become uptime and availability. Most modern-day data centers are designed, managed and maintained in a way to guarantee 99.9%+ uptime at all times.
However, without the right workforce of multi-skilled talent, resources that suddenly go offline are a real concern. Even if downtime occurs rarely, it still has a number of staggering costs associated with it as per a recent report released by the team at IDC.
In that report, it was revealed that Fortune 1000 companies lose between $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year to unplanned application downtime. This amounts to more than just a lack of productivity or asset availability. Downtime equates to missed deadlines. It means sub-par deliverables. It translates to a poor experience on behalf of the people you’re trying to serve and, as a result, diminishing returns in terms of customer service.
Breaking those numbers down even further, it was revealed that the average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is about $100,000. To make matters worse, the average cost of a critical application failure is between $500,000 to $1 million per hour.
Interestingly, another study underlines the fact that despite everyone’s acknowledgement of the importance of the data center, computing assets are still going to waste. It is estimated that as many as 30% of servers in the country have not performed ANY valuable computing work in the past six months. This, too, has a very real dollar amount attached to it – close to $30 billion in idle capital alone.
When taken through this context, to say that a well maintained, properly functioning and wholly available data center is critical to your entire operation is something of a dramatic understatement. In this sense, it isn’t just about having access to the right data center or even acknowledging how important it is. Data centers are just like anything else – a means to an end. They are not the “end” in and of themselves. Only by the adopting the right, strategic approach can you make sure your business’ asset utilization is aligned with its long-term goals in the right way.
Ultimately, these are all among the major reasons why it is not only important to start looking at the modern data center as the true foundation of your business that it has become, but also why finding the right partner to meet your needs is of paramount importance. You need to make sure that you’re choosing the right provider that guarantees multi-skilled talent with the capabilities to span ALL of the many different – yet critical – areas of the data center. This includes server specialists, virtualization engineers, storage engineers, network switching and routing professionals and so much more.
Contact us today to discuss your organization’s data center!
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