Data centers are growing at a significant rate, a growth that has been necessitated by the involvement of the business industry today. As remote sites are continually intensifying, it has been very critical that IT plays a major role in supporting computing at remote sites. The rapidly growing intensity of this business-critical digital activity has been pushed by several factors which may include the following:
- Persuasive mobility
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Real-time analytics
- Wireless connectivity
- Small footprint software
- And other innovative technologies
All of these factors continue to drive business digital activity everywhere because remote computing in the present day is dramatically changing making its environment denser, sophisticated and more importantly, essential and critical to the business.
As a result, in whatever business you are in, remote computing no longer serves your business as a utility to support your geographically dispersed facilities since those facilities are found digitally. They are as much digital as they are physical and basically have become your company’s New Digital Outposts (NDO). Almost all businesses now depend on more intense remote computing environments to minimize their facilities’ costs, while at the same time maintaining a safe and comfortable workplace. Therefore, it is important that IT has to react and respond appropriately to these changes or risk undermining the digital performance and on extremes, the financial performance of the business. The response must be directed to give a new approach to the New Digital Outposts so that it is able to fulfill the requirements of performance, availability, and cost of ownership to remote computing.
Due to these numerous changes, remote computing has forced IT to rethink New Digital Outposts provisioning in six different ways which include:
1) High performance, high density compute/storage/networking
Remote sites are processing a large amount of data in so many different ways. As more data is being processed, more data space, particularly abundance of more square footage will be required to store data where it can be retrieved, staged and analyzed very first. Data center Toronto can be a good way to store it as you will not need to embark on data center construction and still access data whenever you need it.
2) Protection from environmental variables
Many organizations make very intensive investments to make sure that their data centers infrastructure environment is at the right climatic or weather conditions. Therefore, IT must have a better approach to physical protection of NDO infrastructure.
3) Right-sized form factors
Space is a limited resource. Therefore IT must provide a tight, efficient form factor that consumes as little space as possible. Mostly, consume as little floor space as possible.
4) Remote serviceability
Remote locations lack on-site technical staff and it is extremely expensive to send staff there. IT should make it easy for non-technical personnel to perform basic tasks.
5) Security and compliance
IT should provide high-level physical maximum security to all equipment.
6) Streamlined provisioning
IT should provide a repeatable process. Without a repeatable, efficient process, NDO will be extremely slow, very costly and incredibly prone to numerous errors.