That's the view of Hennie van Tonder, head of Product at MWEB Business, who adds that another factor contributing to IT complexity is increasing demand from a mobile and remote workforce for the same level of access to corporate data and systems as on-site personnel.
He notes that the business landscape has changed irrevocably in the last decade as businesses have come to rely on technology, data and automation not for any tangible strategic advantage, but often just to keep up in today's marketplace.
"A major problem for many businesses is that despite the difficult economic climate, their need for increased computing power doesn't diminish. However, the upfront capital expense (CAPEX) needed to upgrade or invest in additional servers can be prohibitive. A solution based on incurring operational expense (OPEX) such as that offered by shared data centres can be more attainable," van Tonder adds.
Affordability is only one of the benefits of shared data centres. Data centre providers like MWEB Business offer customers flexibility, cost savings and reliability: flexibility through the provision of various options, with the ability to quickly and easily scale up or down based on current business needs; and cost savings as a result of economies of scale; and reliability as a result of expertise in designing and implementing solutions as well as in-built redundancy and fail-over systems.
"There are many shared data centres both in South Africa and abroad that offer a range of hosting /data centre solutions. The trick for each business is to do a situation analysis in order to understand both current and future business infrastructure needs," van Tonder says.
Among the most popular data centre services are:
Which is the "best" solution? In order to assist businesses to choose, MWEB Business has listed a few of the pros and cons associated with each type of hosting service.
| Pros | Cons | |
|---|---|---|
| Co-locate | Utilise existing/legacy servers | Investment in depreciating assets |
| Retain existing server architecture | Cost of upgrading outdated servers | |
| Unlimited choice on server specifications and brand | Need to employ skills to maintain and support servers. | |
| Security/environmental/UPS/redundancy benefits of a shared data centre | Travel time for IT personnel | |
| Pay only for rack space used | ||
| Direct access to the internet or VPN services | ||
| Range of connectivity options, capped and uncapped | ||
| Managed Server hosting | As above plus: | Choice of server brand/specifications could be restricted |
| No investment in depreciating assets | Reconfiguration of previous server architecture could be required | |
| Servers upgraded as appropriate | ||
| Outsource management of entire technology infrastructure - hardware, software, 24/7 maintenance, management, support and back-up | ||
| Expert IT resources at your disposal | ||
| 24/7 management of equipment | ||
| Firewall and VPN can be integrated | ||
| Virtual server hosting | No physical hardware costs | May require some training as an on-boarding exercise |
| Choice of a range of predefined virtual servers with associated cost options | You do not have your "own" server Mostly for public cloud use | |
| Flexibility to upgrade resources as needed | ||
| Complete redundancy on server resources | ||
| Virtual data centre | Get the control, security, flexibility and on-demand facilities of a fully-fledged data centre - without the cost of equipment, power, co-location, network and manpower | You do not 'own' any infrastructure |
| Define and create virtual machines as required | Need to have IT skills to maintain and support Virtual environment | |
| Add storage, RAM or increase CPU power almost instantly | ||
| Manage virtual machines remotely |
