What datacenter hardware should be retained for cloud deployment?

Today, companies have a lot to think about when designing their data center overall strategy. When deploying data center design, the key is to adopt a holistic approach to implementation. The challenge facing many CIOs and IT organizations today is to work with their partners to determine the best implementation. First, how do you deal with existing infrastructure?

With the advent of virtualization technology, many companies have eliminated physical servers (despite the huge investment in buying physical servers), using virtualization technology. While many enterprises continue to virtualize in stages, it is known that this long-term virtualization not only brings cost savings to the enterprise, but also provides better performance, agility, and flexibility, among other benefits. The point is that virtualization is not just about saving money, but about bringing more value to the overall IT environment and ultimately to the enterprise.

Today, there are similar challenges facing cloud computing. When companies take action to deploy cloud computing models in data centers and leverage external clouds, it is difficult to decide what to keep and what to eliminate, especially on physical infrastructure issues.

Indeed, reducing it costs is the goal, but what about the investments that have been made? This involves old stories of "dismantling and replacing" that have plagued many emerging technologies in the past. Should companies really consider phasing out its infrastructure? What is the fate of all this investment? Worse, what about the fate of the IT talent that manages them? This has always been an option that IT managers don't want to think about.

Over the past few months, however, I have heard reports of a growing number of CIOs and IT managers who have made the decision to retire some internal solutions to a service solution, whether it is a managed service or a managed service. After interviewing a number of managers, things began to become clear. In the long run, the cost of maintaining and managing old infrastructure and the human resources to complete these tasks is actually becoming more expensive than the older infrastructure, which employs more cost-effective deployments. The only challenge they face is to convince the CEO.

But today's CEOs expect their CIOs and COO to work together to make the necessary it decisions to keep the business going. In several interviews, IT managers pointed out that the numbers were a problem, so the CEO approved the elimination of a lot of the internal infrastructure. Each case is different; In many cases it is still difficult to make a decision. Finally, most infrastructure costs are a major investment in the business, and CEOs still expect to squeeze as much value from their investments as possible.

The challenge is whether this can be decided: what is the potential value of migrating from an internal solution to an external solution? Does the cost of internal management maintenance (including human/capital resources) exceed the cost of eliminating internal infrastructure cloud migrations? In most cases, especially for old infrastructure, people will be surprised to see that making such a decision makes sense.

Are you interested in exchanging ideas? Consider eliminating old infrastructure and migrating to a more serviced model. Have you calculated the cost of maintaining and managing the old infrastructure?