Post-Pandemic Data Center Strategy

I consult with companies from many markets that are scattered across the United States, and most of them had to pivot last year when the COVID pandemic hit. Scrambling for answers for a remote workforce, some were better prepared than others. Almost universally, they took budgets they had for things like data center and sank those funds into remote workforce initiatives. With the change in our work standards, we must define what our new “normal” is and determine what investments we should make in the core, edge, and cloud.

On a global scale, there are about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. The data grows exponentially by ten times every five years, and as the data being created continues to grow, the need to store, clean, process, and analyze the data is becoming a growing concern for many organizations. We are now storing and analyzing data in a different class beyond CRM and ERP systems, and our data includes more social media, web analytics, and IoT data from various devices, as well as machine-generated log data.

For many years, organizations have taken a traditional approach to buying expensive hardware and storing it in rows of racks in a data center located somewhere in the world. However, in 2006, Amazon launched a subsidiary called Amazon Web Services (AWS), which completely changed the future of IT Infrastructure. It began the transition away from the traditional approach of expensive data centers with high power and cooling, hands and feet, and all the hardware expense, to a cloud-based model where the cloud service provider has multiple data centers in a particular region that offer high availability (HA), with dedicated or non-dedicated servers, storage, networking, and many other services and features.

End-User Computing (EUC) refers to computer systems, platforms, and applications that are delivered via network connectivity (or internet) to an end user. EUC has been around for many years, with the customer usually having to buy expensive hardware like servers and storage to stand up the EUC environment.

During this year of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been many issues within schools, colleges, and universities globally on how to deliver student applications.

In today’s pandemic times, we are finding more and more customers and end users are working remotely from home. This requires users to access a number of devices, including laptops and tablets, while at home. Is this secure? Absolutely not.

One way to overcome a lot of the previously mentioned challenges and concerns with storing such large amounts of unstructured data is to move it to a public cloud provider. As for the previously discussed challenges of legacy NAS filers, most of those concerns would no longer be applicable. Essentially, you would be paying the cloud provider to worry about all the infrastructure concerns like capacity, performance, uptime, H/W support, and so on.

Should the dreaded day that your organization suffers a ransomware attack arrive, the severity of the damage could vary from a simple file system encryption to a total lockout. Depending upon the misfortune your IT team is dealt with, the recovery process could possibly consist of a total wipe of the servers, storage, backups, especially critical systems, logical configurations, and property. The most difficult thing to swallow is when you thought you had everything covered in your disaster recovery or backup systems—only to find out the opposite is true.

In prior blog posts, I’ve explained the difference between unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data, and shared the value of unstructured data. In this blog post, I would like to focus on what I believe are the primary barriers preventing organizations from tapping into their unstructured data for analysis.

Performance, Capacity, Scalability, Availability, Security, and Recoverability: These are all pillars of a multi-cloud data center strategy. In the past, applications were dependent on the on-premises data center infrastructure. “What you see is what you get” was pretty much how application developers had to deal with it. Today, the business dictates how an organization deploys data center resources to support an application. For a commercial business, the desire is for the application to generate significantly large amounts of data traffic that translates into revenue. For the public sector, it’s about getting information to and from the community at a rapid pace.