Breaking Away From Data Center Management

The continued success of your business requires agility and speed, whether it’s to adopt the latest technology or expand into new regions.

Long term capital investments, like lengthy data center leases and the need to continually update physical server technology, can be an albatross around the necks of organizations, hindering mobility and slowing the speed of adoption.

Adaptable companies are throwing off that albatross, shrinking their data center footprint and transitioning to more agile infrastructure options. Leaving data center management behind can also free up financial and operational resources which can be redeployed to help drive new strategic initiatives that can accelerate the growth of your core business.

If you’re ready to take the leap and break out of data center management, there are some important steps you’ll need to take first.

Assess your current state

The first step of any major initiative should be assessing your existing infrastructure and applications, because its critical to understand your current state before you can put together a plan to guide you to your future state. Moving out of the data center is no exception.

Assessing and evaluating your environment creates a clear picture of your applications, infrastructure, workloads and workflows. These valuable inputs inform the design of your desired environment, as well as the migration plan. Any assessment should also include a total cost of ownership analysis to help understand current spend, as well as the potential cost savings of transitioning out of data center management.

Design and migrate

Evaluating each component of your environment enables informed decisions about the platforms necessary for your future state. For risk averse organizations with legacy applications, this could mean a design that recreates their existing solution, but in another facility or on virtualized servers. Migrating to these new solutions can be straightforward, with relatively low risk and no need for development or application modernization.

Next, it’s time to build and deploy the target components and begin preparing for what may be the most sensitive step – migration. Migrations can be a nerve-racking ordeal, but they don’t have to be. A properly planned, coordinated and executed migration will minimize the potential risks associated with migrating mission-critical workloads.

Secure

While improving cost efficiency, increasing agility and streamlining operations are generally the main drivers behind exiting the data center, maintaining or enhancing security should be top of mind. Solutions should be designed to address security; changes to architecture, hardware, platforms or processes could necessitate changes to existing security procedures, tools and implementations.

Designs based on best practices and industry regulations should provide a sufficient level of security, but it may be necessary to go beyond the basics in order to maintain continuous compliance with, for example, PCI-DSS, HITRUST-CSF, SOX and FISMA guidelines.

Day-to-day management

Once a new solution is live, it’s time to implement day-to-day management procedures. Effectively managing infrastructure and applications requires a slew of technical skills, including database administration and application management, and tools for monitoring and alerting. If you haven’t already, consider developing action plans to aid in troubleshooting and issue resolution.

Calling in the experts

Moving out of the data center, or simply consolidating a data center footprint, presents an appealing yet daunting challenge for any organizations. Each step of this initiative requires expertise and experience, from assessment and design all the way through to day-to-day operations. Skip any step and risk jeopardizing the integrity and intended efficiency benefits of your solution.

Need guidance? The Rackspace Data Center Breakout Solution can help simplify your exit from the data center in a smooth fashion. With our guidance and ongoing support tailored to your organization’s specific needs, transition with confidence while optimizing IT spend, streamlining IT management and securing your environment. All without needing to re-architect your applications.

This solution is ideal for organizations ready to get out of data center management, but not yet ready to modernize their apps and infrastructure for cloud platforms.

As your trusted strategic partner, Rackspace can also cover IT management needs. With more than two decades of security, performance and scaling expertise, you can rely on Rackspace to provide maintenance, database administration, and security and application management services.

We can also continue to optimize your environment and applications, to ensure they keep delivering the performance and cost efficiency benefits that prompted the departure from the data center in the first place.

Visit our site to learn more about how we can help you successfully break out of the data center, or read about the work we’ve done to help our clients with data center transformation.