Like many companies, we want to cut costs without impacting our operations. There is a lot of tech talk out there, but - in layman’s terms - how can we really expect to benefit from hosting our IT infrastructure in a data center and what should we look for?
In layman’s terms, a data center is a physical place that houses a computer network's most critical systems, including backup power supplies, air conditioning, and security applications. Accordingly, it is the most important and vulnerable component of your computer network - and oftentimes your business.
The benefits of outsourcing to a quality data center include:
- Infrastructure cost savings: Outsourcing is infinitely more cost-effective than developing, designing, remodelling, building and maintaining your own infrastructure and facility.
- Maintenance cost savings: Data centers need stable power, back-up and emergency systems, access controls, specific climates, continual monitoring and other considerations that warrant considerable investment. Outsourcing gives you all of these at a fraction of the cost of an in-house solution.
- Operational cost savings: When you outsource to a supplier with a skilled team, you immediately increase your organization’s functional expertise without taxing any internal resources. If you don’t already have an IT team, you essentially acquire one without the associated salary. If you do have a team in place, your specialists can spend their time innovating and improving your IT systems instead of just keeping things running.
- Time savings: It takes a considerable investment of time and resources to build and maintain in-house facilities for your company’s e-mail, website, telecom equipment, network and applications servers, etc. With an outsourced data center, your employees can focus on your core business instead of spending time on an in-house facility.
- Enhanced security: With a quality data center, ultra-secure data protection and backups are usually value-add components of your outsourced solution. This saves you the additional expenses of having to manage systems and processes to protect against data disaster.
Your choice of data center deserves some consideration because there is a lot riding on your selection and they are not all created equal. The keys to a professional data center are redundancy, quality, security, service and more redundancy. Your chosen provider should have some very solid answers to every “what if” scenario you can imagine. Their security measures, fire suppression systems and climate control features all have to be excellent. Their backup systems and drives have to be able to function effectively in the case of an interruption of electronic power.
As a benchmark, ZEROFAIL’s data centers are some of the most physically and logistically secure infrastructures in our industry. Our principle facility was originally built as a treatment center for a major bank. The building is completely self sustained and operate flawlessly through month-long power outages and Tier1 internet provider failures. We have a second, fully independent datacenter in downtown Montreal that provides an additional layer of redundancy.
Employing a defence in depth strategy, our datacenters are redundantly protected by restricted access cards, biometric scanners, over live cameras with motion detection sensors, on-site security personnel, monitored alarm system, authorization protocols, daily server backups, fire suppression systems, state-of-the-art firewalls and advanced anti-everything protection against viruses, spam and threats. We have a comprehensive Network Operation Center (NOC) that controls every aspect of the network and we monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic 24/7 in real time. We even keep living quarters for our Senior System Administrator just minutes away from our facility to ensure a rapid response in case of an emergency.
ZEROFAIL’s data centers accommodate collocation or dedicated servers. Should you choose to outsource with us, all of the aforementioned features and benefits are included in your flat monthly fee.
