Peter Knight CEO at Adapt looks at how to choose partners in these ever changing times

Chances are that if you are reading this article, then the rapidly rising cost of power and cooling, and the scarcity of data centre space has made outsourcing your data centre a serious consideration.

Data centre outsourcing can be a way to save money, improve service and focus on your organisation’s core business. However, it can also be a way to increase costs, lose control of your company’s data and increase business risk. So, the process of selecting your outsourcing partner should be a rigorous one. Here are some areas that you should investigate before signing on the dotted line.

Size

Make sure your potential partner is the right size for your organisation. While larger providers which typically service FTSE 100-type are well known and provide excellent service, you will need a proportionately larger outsourced budget with the wiliness to enter a minimum contract term of 3-5 years,  with very little flexibility. 

If your budget is more like GBP 1-5 million then you will want a partner who offers more flexibility. This should come in the form of options around shorter term contracts, more choice of hardware, consultations on performance benchmarks, evaluation and monitoring tools and the capability to offer bespoke solutions.

Assets

Once you’ve decided on size, check the scale of your potential partner’s data centre footprint, that is, the geographical spread of the outsourcer’s data centres. Risk management 101 and your organisation’s disaster recovery plans will tell you that you don’t want to put all your servers in the one physical location, so a professional partner should supply four to five different locations over which your servers and risk can be spread.

Each data centre should also meet minimum industry standard levels for power and cooling. Mechanical & Engineering (M&E) should be built to minimum N+1 redundancy standard, even up to N+N on distribution, to include UPS systems, and power generation systems. Power availability should be a minimum of 1.5 Kilowatts of power per square meter. Cooling and humidity parameters should also be covered by a minimum of N+1 standards.

Considerations for connectivity requirements must include diverse entry routes and multiple tier one carriers in the data centre.  Working with a partner that can source the optimum plan for this is necessary.

Your organisation’s access to telecommunication services will depend largely on the building in which you are based. Therefore, it is important for your outsourcing partner to have access to a multitude of on-net telecommunication service suppliers so you have the maximum amount of choice and flexibility for linking your offices and your servers and the public internet.

Information security is also a concern, and for this reason a data centre has to offer a secure environment which minimises the chances of a security breach. Check what physical security measures are in place – such as access control to the data centre facility – and what IP security measures are in place – such as managed firewalls.

Depending on your disaster recovery plans, check whether your partner offers real time replication or only delayed time replication also.

People

After having the right assets, the next most important thing is a consulting capability. Changing your data centre is a complex process so ensure your partner has project management services and the right people to manage your move. Can it document each step of the move; provide timelines, actions, and owners for each element? If not, move on.

Your organisation may have the in-house capabilities or desire to manage its own applications, but then again, it may at some stage want to outsource these as well. Having your partner able to perform this function will save you the added complexity of an additional partner to manage your applications, so check whether it also provides a services capability.

A virtualisation capability is also a must as the same drivers that lead you to consider outsourcing your data centre in the first place will eventually lead you to consider reducing the number of physical servers you have. A reduction of say, 850 physical servers down to 150, is not an unrealistic outcome of a successful virtualisation process.

Having gone through these considerations you will be on you way to finding the right outsourcing partner for your organisation, and the wider benefits of a more stable IT environment, overall better service and access to the best technologies are that much closer.