Have You Seen Our New Data Centre?

Have you seen our new data centre? Actually, it’s not just one data centre – we have dozens and they are all over the globe!

It’s not so long ago that large organisations had a huge competitive advantage over SMEs and small businesses. The big corporates would have data centres in their basements with lots of servers and teams of highly skilled people to look after them.

They had access to computing power and software that smaller companies just couldn’t begin to aspire to. Only the biggest organisations could afford the space, the hardware, the software licenses and the people.

Of course, it was expensive, but it was well worth the investment. And because the financial bar was set so high, large corporates achieved operational efficiencies across all their functions that meant smaller players just weren’t in the same league.

Cloud Computing – the Democratisation of Technology

However, with the advent of Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), even the smallest company has access to the finest IT infrastructure the world has ever seen.

Whether you choose Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, a company with six employees has access to the same computing power as a one with 60,000 staff.

With consumption-based billing, startups can now compete with enterprises and the cost and complexity of technology is no longer a constraint on growth.

Not only does this level the technology playing field, but the landscape is now skewed in favour of the new startup and smaller, agile businesses.

Large organisations that choose to retain their in-house data centres are sitting on a costly expense using technology that is rapidly becoming obsolete as cloud data centres continue to be upgraded with the latest processing power, security features and resilience that even the largest corporates can only dream of.

The Cloud Computing arms race – as the major players seek to grab market share from each other – means that cloud solutions are getting better all the time and cloud consumers are getting better value without suffering the constant cost of obsolescence and upgrade. You’ll also be getting computing power that is much more energy efficient and sustainable that anything you could achieve in-house.

Enterprises avoiding the cloud through concerns over security or control or an attachment to the sunk costs of their in-house data centres are quickly falling behind. As equipment and software go out of date, so too do the skills of the technical team. The good ones will move while they still have a window of opportunity and it will be difficult to attract talent to legacy systems.

And if they do bite the bullet and move to the cloud, they’ll have migration costs, complex hybrid solutions and months or even years of distraction while their in-house IT resources are tied up.

Fast moving agile startups can scale at speed without having to take the periodic hits of adding hardware and the tech staff to manage it. And when they outgrow their office space, they can move to larger premises without the costs of moving data centre hardware and the attendant interruption to business.

Even in the event of a downturn for the business, the cloud company can scale down as well as up – saving on subscriptions and reducing consumption.

A Data Centre in the head office used to be a symbol of technological power and commercial success. Today it is more like a liability sucking resources out of the business and gradually bleeding it dry!

Need Help?

Do you want to more about opportunities for Cloud Computing and how it would impact your business? 

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