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Own Or Outsource?
A service provider's data center lets you focus on your business and not on the IT systems, but in many cases building a data center is unavoidable
Thursday, August 04, 2005
The purpose of a data center is to keep your data and applications available at all times, but it is not necessary for you to go and build a data center from scratch for doing so. There will be specific requirements which will make it necessary for you to have a data center built for you and there can be some needs which can be fulfilled by taking data hosting or server co-location services from a data center service provider.
| Difference |
| Own
Data Center |
Hosted Data Center |
| Security:
Common perception is that data held in your own data center is more
secure, well, this is not entirely wrong |
Ensure that the service
provider has put all the necessary security checks and measures in place.
Also check if the data center is certified by a standards body |
| Manageability:
There is no escaping on this front, if you own a data center you have to
deal with its manageability chores |
You don't have to deal with
any data center manageability issues; however, application and data
manageability is still your responsibility |
| Speed:
If you need to access the data at very high speeds, such as
Gigabit/sec, then a local data center is inevitable |
With improved bandwidth
conditions, dedicated bandwidth of a few megabits/sec to the data center
is common, but not beyond that |
| Availability:
Appropriate data and application protection mechanisms, including
disaster recovery center have to be put in place |
Most data centers provide
stringent SLAs for application and data availability, even in case of a
major disaster |
| Cost:
This will include the upfront cost and operational expenditures, which
can go quite high in the longer term |
With a service provider, you
only have to pay for the service, which again can be very high if you have
huge amount of data |
J Sheshadri, CTO, Emerson Network Power India Pvt. Ltd
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