Published on October 29, 2018
By Leo Lee

When organisations are considering to house their mission critical environment in a commercial data centre, the immediate question is ‘which one?’

WHICH COLOCATION PROVIDER?

Apart from the commercial considerations, it is important to evaluate the colocation data centre providers on both their data centre facilities infrastructure as well as their data centre governance, operations and maintenance practices. The 2 important questions to ask are:

1. Is the data centre built to any standards such as the ANSI/TIA-942, ANSI/BICSI-002 etc.
2. Are they operating the data centre based on any standard such as ISO-27001 for security, ISO-9001 for generic quality management or DCOS® (the first complete data centre operations standard).

THE CHALLENGE

With many data centres not being certified, it is often up to the organization who wishes to outsource its data centre to evaluate the commercial data centres themselves. To fully understand the technical implementation and any potential risks, the individual performing the evaluation must have the right competences. It is therefore vital for organizations to have their own staff trained on the technical and operational aspects of data centres to avoid falling into the trap and being potentially misled by typical marketing messages such as “believe us, we are the best data centre in the world”.

MANAGING YOUR RISKS, PROTECTING YOUR INTERESTS

Whether you are having an on-premise data centre or having, or thinking about having, your data centre being outsourced, you can’t escape the fact that you must maintain in-house expertise as part of managing your business risk. When the commercial data centre is not living up to your expectation to serve your mission critical environment and impacting your customers, as the manager you really don’t want to say “I believed what the outsourced data centre told me”. Even if you have some penalty clauses in your agreement with the data centre service provider, those penalties will never compensate the full business damage to your organization.

Obviously, commercial data centres are often doing a great job but as the old saying goes “trust is good but checking is better”. In order to be able to check, in-house competences are still required no matter what.