Powering IT’s Future: A Renewed Look at Data Centers

Whether you’re thinking, feeling, or moving, you’re using it. We’re talking about electricity, of course. Just as electricity powers the human body, it also powers the world around us, including our homes, our vehicles, the places we shop, and the content we stream. Simply put, electricity is everywhere.

As we become increasingly dependent on electricity throughout our lives, our ability to tolerate interruptions in it decreases. In business, having reliable, sustainable, and affordable power is a crucial, yet often overlooked part of every organization’s daily operations, most especially in business-critical usages like the data center.

Data centers make the business world go ‘round. They power CRMs, ERP systems, accounting software, and core business applications. While many companies have made moves to adopt cloud services or host their internal infrastructure in a colocation facility, many haven’t. Whether you’re a staunch holdout or an early adopter, there are many ways data centers can bring power benefits to your organization.

Read on as we explore four of the E’s of Data Center Power.

E is for Efficient

Data centers and cloud providers are designed to handle large and variable workloads. While technology’s physical infrastructure takes on smaller and smaller forms, it is becoming more power dense, meaning even though the IT equipment you procure today takes up less space, it absolutely requires more power than it did even five years ago. With that, efficiency becomes the name of the game.

Beyond having excellent power sources, data centers and cloud providers are built to scale. Each facility and service is planned, designed, and built with a full focus on the days ahead so they can easily scale to keep up with growing IT trends in addition to your current needs.

Leveraging a colocation facility or moving to the cloud allows your organization to finally put an end to the continuous capital investments that go into maintaining an internal data center. With renewed bandwidth and the efficiency of the provider world working to your advantage, you can turn toward the core focus of your business and let IT become a growth for your business.

E is for Effective

Not only are data center and cloud providers efficient because of their inherent skill sets, they are also effective at consistently delivering reliable power to your most treasured IT assets. Most providers staff their own teams with specialized roles that tend to each level of the power infrastructure, giving you ultimate peace of mind and a level of specialization and expertise unattainable on most in-house teams.

Data center and cloud providers are very effective in ensuring the lights stay on, which is why most offer a 100% SLA pertaining to supplying power to your colocation cabinets and cloud workloads. As more business is conducted via these frameworks, it’s worth reconsidering making the jump to a cloud or colocation environment with a data center operator who specializes in keeping your world moving forward.

E is for Economical

If you’ve ever bought anything from a wholesale club, then you’re already familiar with the concept of “the more you buy, the more you save.” Simply put, data centers have immense buying power — they procure both infrastructure and power at a scale individual organizations simply can’t match — and they can secure more favorable costs for these utilities.

Fortunately for you, those savings get passed back to you as a client, and that results in a significantly more economical monthly power bill for your organization. But as if those savings weren’t enough, the cost benefits of partnering with providers don’t end there.

Maintaining your own data center is expensive. It requires many one-time and ongoing expenses to deliver optimal results for your business. Even simple maintenance on UPS, chillers, generators, and the like can be an expensive venture, replacement costs notwithstanding. Beyond the balance sheet, data center providers find economical efficiencies with things like free cooling in the winter months, relieving the burden of consumed power by taking advantage of the season’s readily available cold air.

With data center and cloud providers leveraging myriad ways to maximize the economics of operating, it might be time to run the numbers for your own organization to see what those savings could do for your business.

E is for Environmentally Friendly

Let’s face it: Our planet looks and feels different than it did 10 years ago, and it’s going to look and feel different in yet another 10 years. That’s why we’re seeing many organizations launch their own ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives. This focus on the sustainable delivery of the power that enables IT workloads is only going to continue to grow moving forward.

Most providers are well underway with forming their own ESG initiatives with a significant focus on sourcing power from renewable and environmentally friendly sources, like wind and solar power. Relying on the efforts of these providers can enable your businesses’ efforts to reduce the carbon footprint left behind by internally owned and managed data centers that still operate as they did years ago.

The number of Energy Star, LEED certified, and similarly focused groups’ data centers continues to grow, as does the number of providers making large investments into identifying ways to keep up power demand while reducing the overall impact on our planet. Moving toward cloud or colocation facilities that already have these investments underway can put your business on the leading edge of future-proofing your business for the changing world.

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Whether all four E’s of data center power are relevant to your business or you prioritize one over another, the reality is there is no “one size fits all” approach to weighing your cloud and colocation options. Because of this, evaluating your own company’s strategy can be an undertaking if going alone. The good news is, you don’t have to.

Having an agnostic advocate in your corner to help you examine your options, their costs, and their potential benefits to your business is paramount. Not only can these experts help you navigate your endless options in this field, but they can leverage the buying power of their vast provider networks to secure optimal pricing, favorable terms, and better offers. TierOne focuses on enabling your business, helping you better evaluate, consider, and execute on the options available to your organization.

The next time you hear the whir of your organization’s server stacks or find yourself balking at yet another exorbitant power bill, reconsider the four E’s of Data Center Power, and then give your resident experts a call.