What economic and business factors are making it difficult for CFOs to meet growing IT infrastructure demands in-house?
Today, the CFO has a big say in IT infrastructure investments. Companies are faced with important choices on the best place to allocate money to grow or maintain their business. And whether that business is heavily based on IT infrastructure or not, the challenge for the CFO remains the same: How do I strike the right balance while investing wisely in IT, sales, marketing, customer service, product development, service delivery and other areas of the business?
As soaring capital expenditures and overwhelmed staffing resources start making in-house services less feasible, IT infrastructure outsourcing starts to become the smart alternative.
What IT infrastructure is most suitable to be outsourced to a data center?
Almost everything can be outsourced, but for a lot of companies, only certain elements make the most sense. We are seeing business customers outsource their data centers, the management of their servers, network connectivity (which can be secured in the outsourced data center), load balancing, security, storage systems — and even certain job functions.
The answer to what IT infrastructure is suitable for outsourcing comes down to whether or not its outsourcing will result in a better solution that delivers quantifiable cost improvements and improved service levels.
What traits should an organization look for in an ITO partner?
Data center colocation, managed hosting and managed services providers come in different flavors, with varied power and cooling capabilities. Regardless of your firm’s specific needs, you should always seek out ITO partners with an operations and services model that is well run and has sufficient growth capacity to meet your space, power and cooling needs — both now and into the future.
Beyond that, consider financial stability, physical and logical security in and around the data center facilities, geographic diversity to ensure redundancy, clearly defined SLAs and multiple connectivity options when identifying the capabilities you need your ITO partner to deliver.
Pete Stevenson is CEO of Latisys. Reach him at [email protected].
