In a nutshell: Commercial and environmental pressures on businesses and IT are leading to profound change
Key points:
- Cloud-based computing can tackle environmental and commercial issues. For some.
- This requires a rethink of why organisations need large data centres
- Space and energy savings and lower IT complexity will contribute to the bottom line
- Almost as a by-product, an organisation would improve its environmental standing
The purpose of this paper is to set the data centre and its future evolution into a broader perspective. But, don’t expect ‘magic bullets’. We don’t believe they exist. Your data centre evolution depends on things like the nature of your organisation, the type of data centre or centres, the applications you run, the kit you use, the sensitivity of your data and, indeed, the availability of resources - people, energy, connectivity and so on.
It also depends on where you are on the evolutionary scale, from a rats-nest of silo'ed applications on a jumble of servers to a fully virtualised, consolidated and harmonised environment which is aligned with the business, delivering secure computing services to any authorised user, anywhere in the world, on any device.