Keogh makes the point that nobody putting in place infrastructure today would build out a data centre of their own when it is so easy to access the functionality in the cloud. The only reason to use an on-site data centre is if you already have one, perhaps as a legacy of prior investment.
“Unless you are a very large organisation, it just doesn’t make sense to build one when you can just pay for the space you need at the same time as getting a degree of comfort from knowing that it’s in a facility that’s always available and highly secure. But most importantly, you’ll get access to those upstream facilities to the cloud providers,” he said.
“From a file services perspective, from a mail, SharePoint and Active Directory perspective, portions are moving to the cloud, but still there is a sense that there are certain applications that will be around for a long time that just don’t lend themselves to migration”
“You must have that on-demand connection to your Salesforces, your Amazons and your Azures. You must be able to switch from your rack in the data centre where you’re taking a footprint for your own infrastructural needs, to couple that with a hybrid requirement, whether it’s public or private. That’s the key.”
Open verdict
That the way companies are consuming IT infrastructure and resources is changing rapidly is not really news. However, according to Garry Connolly, president and founder of the Host in Ireland group, whether this spells the death knell of the data centre as it has been traditionally constructed is not yet known.
“My own sense on it is that this depends on whether you speak to a software guy, an infrastructure guy, an owner of a data centre or an owner of data. For this reason, the term ‘data centre’ is often misunderstood,” he said.
“Some people think it means a physical building, others think it’s their data cluster, some think it’s the VLANs that they have left, right and centre. I think, ultimately, it’s about where data rests. And that’s the discussion; where does your data rest?”
Connolly said that in his opinion, it is a certainty that in decades to come the idea that companies will host crucial data for their company on site will not exist, for lots of reasons. At the same time activities that are routine and normal now regarding data will not be normal anymore.
“Perhaps not for a few years, but in the future on-site storage won’t happen. Ultimately, what the last five to six years has taught businesses, particularly those that have the value of their data ingrained into them, is that they need to have a clear idea what they are. They need to ask ‘what are we? Are we a bank or are we an IT company? Are we an insurance company or are we an IT company? Ultimately, data and the hosting and distribution of data is a non-core activity.”
Miner or polisher
According to this logic, the farming of data and the analytics associated with it such as that found in Big Data should not be core activities for all but the largest or most specialised companies. “Do you really want to be the miner? Or do you want to be the polisher of the diamond,” Connolly asked.
He believes that in predicting the future of the enterprise’s relationship with data, there is a ready comparison to be made with how companies use with electricity.
“I like to draw the analogy between electricity and data and the ownership of the data centre, or indeed the ownership of the infrastructure. If you go back 50 or 60 years, people were privately generating their own electricity, because they had to. But now it’s all as a service — you turn it on and you turn it off,” he said.
“That’s ultimately where we’re going.”
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