Everybody talks about the speed of IT change, however it always has been – and will continue to be – much faster than everybody expects. Think about technology twenty years ago. The internet was in its infancy, the founder of Facebook was just 9 years old and probably didn’t realise he would grow up to be the youngest billionaire in the world! Now let’s take a look at the speed of IT change specifically in data centre terms and you’ll soon see that it’s even more evident. The average life of a data centre is only about 15 – 20 years. When you think about the changes in IT in that timeframe, you can begin to see how hard it is to predict capacity requirements, let alone tie yourself up in a fairly substantial speculative spend!The million dollar question however is: how can CIO’s make effective decisions on future demands? Is it possible to predict that far into the future in today’s speed of change? Part of the answer is having solutions that can flex with your business. Starting with the infrastructure, it’s important that the data centre itself can adjust to the business requirements overtime. Where you can simply dial capacity up and down in line with live business requirements. Whether it’s an entire data centre or a few racks of colocation, your organisation shouldn’t be built around your data centre, rather your data centre should be built around your business needs. Genius isn’t it!Today’s CIO is adopting a new way of thinking that encompasses new business needs and achieves short and medium term fulfilments while maintaining flexibility for the long term. With that in mind, my advice for today’s CIO’s is to ensure the data centre they are using is flexible enough to adapt to the change in and around their business. Traditionally this may have been something which was almost impossible to achieve, but with new techniques available within modern data centres, this flexibility is now fairly easy to achieve. In fact, it has become somewhat of a standard across Colt’s ftec data centre facilities.Take a look at this short two minute video to find out about everything a CIO needs to take into account when forecasting data centre requirements in today’s climate of continuous change.
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