The Right Data Center Architecture for Your Organization

Many of the customers I interact with have on-premises data centers, and they swear that they will never go to the cloud. On the other side of the spectrum, some customers have fully embraced cloud, to the point where they are running all their workloads in the cloud. In the middle, I have customers who are running some applications in the cloud and some on-premises—a hybrid environment, if you will. As a Solutions Architect, I feel the need to expand on why organizations choose between these varying architectures when designing their data center.

A lot of cloud adoption is driven by the business use case. Many commercial businesses have high availability requirements, and 100% on-premises data centers are capital-extensive—not to mention that the ongoing maintenance and refresh costs are just as exorbitant. Cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, provide elastic products and services that allow for automatic scalability, performance, availability, automation, and durability, all at less painful recurring costs. Security and controls are also provided with advanced technologies that are faster and more agile to implement compared to on-premises options.

Another use case for partial cloud adoption involves running secondary instances of the workloads, or data replicated from on-premises workloads, to cover the business during disasters and outage. Having archival and backup copies of the data to comply with the offsite requirements of the business—all without having to stand up another on-premises data center that can be spun up when needed—is a big advantage. Another great use case for cloud is for development and testing. Developers have a sandbox to play in and conduct user acceptance testing, and it’s kept isolated from the sacred production environment.

However, the biggest benefit of all to most businesses is that they will not have to maintain a facility just to provide a highly managed location for servers, storage, and networking gear. From a business perspective, cloud data centers are simply a service that’s paid for on a periodic (usually monthly) basis. There’s no need to deal with hardware, buildings, cooling, power, and so on. I guess I’m driving the point home here.

Why, then, do some organizations choose not to move to the cloud at all? A lot of non-commercial organizations, such as public and government agencies, may have restrictions on cloud adoption that go as far as strict “no cloud” policies. These organizations may not have accountability for generating revenue, and the requirements of a commercial business may not apply to them. However, as a taxpayer and a technologist, I wish those dollars could be properly spent on the most cost-effective data center design—but that’s a story for a different blog.

To sum it all up: Is a private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment the right fit for your organization? The answer depends on your business use case. Is it one of the items I discussed in this blog post, or do you have other considerations? ConvergeOne has data center and cloud specialists who can help answer your questions and design the right adoption strategy. Let’s take away the uncertainties that can cloud your imagination (pun intended) and sit down to map out a clear strategy.