Scaling for Growth: 3 Keys for Your Data Center

Technology is constantly evolving, and the processes and skills needed to manage it efficiently must evolve as well. Availability, security, and skills are key to ensure continuous efficient operations and the flexibility to meet the dynamic needs of customers.

Availability

For most data center professionals, availability is top priority in their day-to-day operations. However, managing availability has become more complex given the unique requirements of individual resources, environments, and applications. New technologies provide opportunities to improve responsiveness and scalability, as well as provide high availability to your customers. Whether your data center serves a single organization or a thousand, consider ways to strengthen core availability strategies:

• Contingency Planning: including weather, unexpected equipment failure, human error, and other industry or geographical threats.
• Redundancy: consider power, data carriers, switching, and backups.
• Environmental: in addition to day-to-day heating/cooling issues in the data center, consider the environmental needs of any micro data centers.
• Monitoring: data center infrastructure management solutions provide real time awareness of system performance and potential issues.

Security

Security threats come from all directions. Millions of new viruses are created every year, and internal errors are a significant source of security issues. To deal with diverse threats, improve the planning process, and strengthen security, it’s important to align security strategies with business priorities. Which of the following aspects of your security plan needs additional focus?

• Application Level Threats: including management of new applications or files.
• Remote Threats: eliminate system weaknesses by covering the basics including intrusion prevention, firewalls, and applying software fixes.
• On-site Threats: minimize threats through implementation of bio-metrics, logging, and monitoring.
• Incident Planning: consider ways to strengthen staff response in the event of a breach.
• Awareness Management: many security breaches start with an internal user error, so ongoing communication and training is essential.

Skills

Skills are sometimes overlooked in the rush to implement new technologies and deliver innovative solutions, but they are key to scaling for growth. In some areas, IT skills are in short supply, including professionals with industry, application, and technology certifications. Business leaders are addressing IT skills gaps in a variety of ways including:

• Skills Assessment: analyze the skill set of the data center team to identify opportunities for collaboration and potential skill gaps.
• Developing a Skills Network: data center managers assess needs across the business and actively manage a network of partners that delivers specific skills and capabilities.
• Outsourcing: short-term or long-term outsourcing of projects is a common way to gain needed skills.
• Improving Efficiency: eliminating process issues and infrastructure vulnerabilities enables staff to focus on other data center priorities.

Are you ready to grow?

Whatever the size of your data center, we’re here to help you strengthen vital systems and prepare for growth. Through our integrated solution consulting, we can help you meet your data center goals and ensure that you’ll be ready to meet growing demands.

Our partnership with Vertiv/Liebert enables us to provide the latest technological solutions to meet your infrastructure needs and expert resources to implement solutions. Contact us to schedule a call with our engineers and learn how we can help you scale your data center for growth in today’s competitive environment.