Making Room for the Agile Business

Organisations cannot afford any constraints upon expansion; but they also cannot afford to over extend by increasing office space or adding huge swathes of new staff. One of the key areas of agility must be within IT. Why retain the data centre within expensive and office space? Why overspend on electricity because the internal server room or data suite is, by default, far less efficient than a dedicated specialist provider data centre? Why limit the business to the size of the available data centre space and resource?

As growing numbers of organisations begin to make positive plans for the future, is the office really the best place for the Data Centre, asks Joanna Sedley-Burke, Managing Director, Sovereign Data Connect?

Agile Business
There are a number of signs that UK businesses are beginning to emerge from the sustained economic gloom. Certainly the service sector is performing well, which is good news considering it accounts for around 75% of the UK economy; and office rents in London and the South East are expected to rise steeply in the coming months due to a measurable increase in demand.

However, this increase in the cost of office accommodation should not be considered simply as a sign of positive business activity; it should prompt serious consideration about how the business is structured. What is the best way to make use of that increasingly expensive office space? How easy will it be to expand staff numbers within the current environment? And can the existing internal IT infrastructure also scale to rapidly support new business activity? Should the business now begin to actively consider the role dedicated colocation and hosting providers can play in creating a more agile and responsive business model?

Organisations have endured significant pain over the past five years in managing the cost of retrenching. As growth plans begin to be considered, it is now essential to create a business model unconstrained by the mundane logistics of space and infrastructure.

Space Constraint
There is no doubt that many businesses have become far more flexible over the past five years - from the use of hot desking to the adoption of flexible, remote and home working. However, when organisations need to increase staff resource, the reality of squeezing new individuals into already overcrowded offices is an increasing challenge.

Yet many of these organisations will also have a significant amount of floor space dedicated to housing computer equipment. Indeed, to the frustration of the rest of the business, many of these server rooms are actually less crammed than in the past because organisations have used virtualisation to reduce hardware..

Of course, should a major expansion be required, it is highly unlikely that the current infrastructure will be able to scale - despite virtualisation - to meet requirements without massive capital expenditure and significant upheaval.

Business Cost
There is a growing fear that too many businesses are, perhaps unwittingly, going to find themselves constrained by continuing to locate the data centre or server room within expensive office space. From cost to scalability, risk to skills, keeping the server room 'in house' fundamentally compromises the concept of an agile business.
Not designed from the ground up to support the needs of IT equipment, the in-house server room is unlikely to be power efficient - however innovative the cooling design and air conditioning technologies - and certainly consumes far more electricity (at a significant cost) than the equivalent equipment located within a state of the art data centre designed to achieve the best PUE ratings.
Indeed, the most recent figures reveal that while the PUE rating of a good, modern data centre is between 1.3 and 1.4; the average in house server room or data suite has a PUE of between 2.0 and 3.0. This demonstrates the huge additional, and unnecessary, levels of power consumption required by an in-house data centre- and the business is unlikely to have access to the wholesale electricity prices enjoyed by the dedicated data centre.

Data Centre Efficiency
By relocating the equipment to a dedicated data centre outside a major urban conurbation, an organisation gains access to a more energy efficient design - and lower electricity prices - and gains the economies of scale of the dedicated data centre resource to manage the infrastructure. It also automatically achieves that essential disaster recovery and business continuity planning that so many businesses do not achieve.
Furthermore, freeing up that space for revenue generating personnel provides an immediate financial benefit to the business. Indeed, as one company discovered recently, removing the computer room from a central London office to a dedicated data centre not only enabled the addition of new staff without adding space but also improved its disaster recovery strategy and created a fully scalable model to support future expansion plans.

Conclusion
Even with a more optimistic outlook, economic growth is unlikely to be smooth. Organisations need to build in far more flexibility to the model; to add revenue generating staff without investing in additional space and extending IT capability without requiring significant capital expenditure. In reality, the argument for locating a data centre within the corporate office makes no sense given the quality of colocation and hosting services now on offer and the wide access to reliable, fast communications.

Moving the data centre to a dedicated provider gives the business the ability to expand without incurring additional costs; and provides the CIO with access to the scalable, flexible, well managed data centre resources required to respond to fast changing business needs. Critically, by removing the data centre from the office, organisations can get one step closer to creating a far more agile and responsive business model, an approach that will undoubtedly be essential to exploit emerging opportunities for growth.