2020 has brought most companies more than their share of new challenges, many of which are information technology-based. Many found themselves unprepared for the sudden and complex transition to supporting a largely remote workforce dependent on cloud-based tools and technologies. For companies deploying data centers in a hybrid fashion, 2020 proved to be a year of steep learning curves as demands on cloud-based services and support increased. And for companies looking to get better at running hybrid data center concepts, 2020 was also a year of valuable learning.
As a data center infrastructure advisor to leading organizations around the world, including many Fortune 500 companies, PLANNET is at the forefront of hybrid datacenter deployment best practices. Here are a few of the trends we are seeing, many of which have been accelerated by the Pandemic.
Colocation and Cloud Will Continue To Dominate
“A key focus of 2021 is that data centers are going to continue to be deployed in a cloud or hybrid data center infrastructure,” says Gary Davis, PLANNET’s Vice President and Senior Principal for data center consulting. As a result of shifting office-based workloads, we see opportunity for rethinking the data center. A majority of the companies PLANNET advises are taking steps to right-size and modernize their critical datacenters. Migration to colocation and to cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS or Azure continue to gain in adoption, creating hybrid data centers that keep some necessary critical premise systems while seizing on cost, agility and resilience benefits from the cloud.
Focus on Rightsizing Datacenters
The shift to outsourced data center services means that many Enterprises have an opportunity to address their overbuilt and under-performing data centers that now need to be re-engineered for delivery of services in a hybrid environment that supports interoperation of premise and cloud-based systems, data and infrastructure. “We need to right-size and modernize legacy datacenters as we are moving systems to cloud and colocation providers,” adds Davis. “It used to be that most critical systems were deployed to client-owned and managed facilities, but now that we have begun the transition to collocation and cloud infrastructure and services, many are finding that for reasons of security, performance/latency, compliance and operations, there are still systems that require local critical infrastructure associated with a traditional premise data center.” Sourcing IT service providers that can provide robust support across a hybrid data center deployment is often taken up as part of these rightsizing activities, keeping companies focused on their core competencies and reducing the reliance on increasingly commoditized in-house IT services.
Managed Services and AI Improve The Work From Home Experience
Managed services and AI can leverage cloud-based systems and assist in making the work from home experience better. In 2021 and beyond, expect to see IT personnel placing a greater focus on systems management as it exists from multiple structures, and a greater focus on networks that interconnect various and diverse locations of data. According to PLANNET’s Nick Henry, “Support for home office and remote workers has inherent complexities around it, everybody’s internet speeds are different and can impact people’s abilities to work. Secure, easy access to company data/files, and the ability to share/collaborate are also critical keys to success. IT organizations are going to make people’s experience as secure, smooth and productive as possible.”
PLANNET: Your Go-To Datacenter and Cloud Infrastructure Expert
PLANNET can help you with strategy, planning and execution of your critical data center colocation and cloud migration. Associated vital work from home considerations such as corporate data security, reliable Internet connectivity, bandwidth expansion, calling, printing, and meeting platforms are a few examples of topics PLANNET can help strategize. PLANNET is uniquely qualified as we are a vendor-agnostic managed service provider that will develop a plan tailored to the company’s individual needs in order to make these new transitions as simple as possible.
Please feel free to reach out for a consultation on how PLANNET can help support your data center and colocation infrastructure and implementation needs.
