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As a leading player in the emerging data centre market, we have created Global Switch Insights to assist businesses in understanding how best protect their technological assets.
These commentaries examine many of the fundamental issues at the core of business continuity, best practices for ensuring an optimum operating environment for housing your IT equipment / data and topical issues affecting your business today.
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Many companies are now re-evaluating how and where they choose to house mission-critical equipment. The challenge lies in finding the best balance in terms of physical resilience, locational convenience, flexibility, value for money, power and cooling capacity.
The vast majority of traditional office buildings simply cannot meet the demands of today's data centres. Growing power and cooling requirements, coupled with ever more prescriptive data and risk management standards, mean conventional office-based data centres no longer provide the necessary resilience.
For most businesses, the optimum solution is to re-locate to flexible, purpose-designed "IT space" managed by data centre specialists.
Most discussions about data security focus on IT and network security. Yet a breach in physical security will significantly increase the risk of unauthorised access to sensitive equipment and data.
To provide optimum protection for mission-critical equipment, organisations must combine the highest levels of “IT security” with maximum physical security in and around the buildings that house their IT infrastructure.
Power has always been a data centre priority. But the latest IT systems, and the way in which they are deployed, are creating fresh challenges that require innovative solutions. In many enterprise data centres, power infrastructures are reaching their limits. This restricts corporate IT strategies, pushes up costs and can compromise IT availability and resilience.
Keeping mission-critical equipment sufficiently cool is one of the biggest challenges facing today’s IT professional. Excessive heat, generated by the latest technologies, is pushing current data centre environments to their limit; significantly reducing the efficiency and lifespan of sensitive IT equipment. A cool, regulated and well-planned environment is essential to optimise performance and minimise risk.
Despite the increasing demands of new technologies and the resulting need to house data centres in purpose-designed facilities; the majority of businesses continue to locate their staff and mission-critical IT systems within the same environments. Traditional office buildings however, cannot supply the level of resilience required, placing unprecedented demands on building infrastructure and services and increasing the risk of costly downtime.
As companies deploy high density and blade servers to reduce costs and pack more computing power into less space, they often fail to fully realise the strain that this technology will place upon their existing data centre.
Together with commercial property experts CB Richard Ellis, in this issue of Business Insights we have reviewed the three most common data centre alternatives: office conversion, buy & build, and third party specialist providers, to determine which provides the most resilient and cost-effective solution.
The protection of your company's mission-critical IT equipment must be a top priority in any disaster avoidance strategy: it is essential that you have identified the main threats and implemented appropriate controls.
This edition outlines some of the key factors for consideration when devising an effective IT disaster avoidance strategy; including the ramifications of poor planning, the likely physical threats to data centres and methods for mitigating IT risk.
Any data centre migration is a complex and potentially disruptive undertaking that involves thorough planning and execution. Global Switch has identified the key issues and has created a checklist to ensure you achieve a seamless transition when migrating your data centre.
The string of blackouts last summer provided a stark reminder of the extent to which economies have become dependent on electrical power. Prolonged outages caused scenes of chaos, severe disruption to transport and communications systems, and untold damage to business.
So, how can you protect your business? In this issue, Global Switch reviews the major risk factors, and the elements necessary to ensure that your IT equipment remains operational during power outages.
Increasingly stringent regulatory requirements mean that directors must ensure their mission-critical IT infrastructure is protected in secure and highly resilient environments and that appropriate back-up and recovery procedures have been established.
In the search for zero downtime, the role of the physical environment in mitigating risk is becoming abundantly clear. This piece reviews some of the crucial design elements to consider when planning your data centre.
