Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 03 | Page 39

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Datacentres

Six steps on transforming your datacentre

Businesses need to look at datacentre revamp exercises as an opportunity to align their requirements with IT expansion.
The datacentre is under increasing pressure. As with all business operations, there is natural wastage: applications become redundant and servers become under-utilised. Datacentres need to self-monitor and regulate. If assets are not recycled then storage will become a cost drain through burgeoning capacity. The need for capacity to scale has to be met quickly for business opportunities to be realised and there is no spare budget to waste on under-utilised infrastructure. Ongoing running costs also come under scrutiny when it comes to making savings.
Legacy infrastructure can be an energy guzzler. Modern, energy-efficient solutions not only help meet costcutting objectives but also business directives around environmental impact. While being nimble, adaptive, efficient and streamlined, the datacentre still has to be safe, secure, and resilient. Data loss and data breaches are always top of mind for businesses that must comply with regulations and data laws.
However, ICT transitions are nonetheless fraught with complexity and challenges. Technology evolves at a rapid pace, sometimes even as options are being assessed. Solution implementation can be complex and migration strategies have to safeguard against data loss and service outages. Cloud data storage provides many benefits of accessibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. For many, datacentre infrastructure is a hybrid IT framework of on-premise and off-site, servers, network infrastructure, and storage. Some applications may be accessible virtually and others bound to local networks.
If the current infrastructure cannot be discovered or measured, then businesses are challenged to reach an understanding on what it will take to www. intelligentcio. com INTELLIGENTCIO
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