Data Center Management: In house or Outsourced?

As your business grows, you need the right IT infrastructure to run it. In

order to run your IT infrastructure smoothly, you need a data center. Further,

to ensure high availability of your data center itself, you need the right staff

to manage it. Unfortunately, finding and retaining the right manpower to manage

a data center today is nothing to write home about. That's why many data centers

in the country have outsourced their management to third parties. Yet, there are

also many who prefer to have their own teams doing all the management. So the

question is, which option is more suitable? Should you have in-house or

outsourced management, or maybe you should use a mix of both? Let's weigh the

pros and cons of each.

Anil Chopra Editor

Let's look at in-house first. If you already have a large in house team with

a wide, skillset, then shifting to an outsourced model wouldn't be very

feasible. If you decide to retain your team as well as outsource the management,

it would have huge financial implications. The only way to curb this would be to

reduce the size of your team, which would also mean reducing the size of your

talent pool. Having an in house team gives you better control over your data

center as you know everyone personally, and aren't really paying anything extra

for every small thing you want to get done. In an outsourced setup, you'd have a

fixed set of services that you'd be paying for, and would get billed for

anything that's extra. So, you must possess excellent negotiation skills to be

able to strike the best outsourcing deals. You may even need additional manpower

just to manage the managed services provider. An in-house team also means better

control over your sensitive data. With an outsourced partner, you have to put in

strict SLAs to ensure that your data center and all the critical data in it are

not misused. Outsourcing to an external agency has its own set of advantages as

well. If you don't have dedicated manpower or have a small team managing your

data center, then outsourcing is a great option. It also means that you don't

have to put up with figuring out ways of finding and retaining the right

manpower. It's the service provider's burden now. You also don't have to worry

about training employees every time there's a new technology is introduced for

data centers, which happens quite frequently. It just means that you only have

to worry about running your core business. The best option would of course be to

use a mix of both, and get the best of both worlds. If you want to know more

about data center management strategies and practices, then read the strategy

story in this issue.