Any seasoned executive knows that old saying “you have to spend money to make money” is true. But only if you apply it judiciously. And only if you spend smartly. You have to maximize the value of every dollar – turning it into an investment that keeps paying dividends. A good example is data center outsourcing, which can be a prize-winning investment, not just another expense.
That’s especially important right now, as companies around the world are wrestling with astounding change coming from every direction. It seems as if every type of change affects your company’s relationship with data itself and with data center operations.
You’re dealing with rising costs for everything from labor to power, the complexities of remote locations and more mobile workers, vastly larger volumes of data to manage and store, and technology options based on entirely new functionality assumptions. The breadth of these issues accentuates the need to invest wisely, with the future in mind.
Complexity may be the new normal, but data center outsourcing can be specifically designed to address each of your challenges in ways that help you save money and boost agility. That’s why it’s not just another IT expense, it can be a particularly worthwhile investment.
How does data center outsourcing give you such a great return?
It leverages your existing resources.
No matter if you’re a huge global enterprise or a smaller localized company, every business has to live within its means in order to assure a healthy bottom line. Outsourcing is well known as an option that can bring significant savings, through streamlined processes that increase efficiency and, therefore, productivity. You can maintain or increase service levels without sacrificing quality. Usually at a lower total cost of ownership.
But data center outsourcing leverages more than your budget. When you offload functions onto an outside partner, you can put your in-house IT staff to work on more productive and more forward-thinking projects. That makes optimum use of their special skills and training, rather than wasting their time on mundane maintenance and support tasks. On the flip side, your outsourcing team brings skills and knowledge you don’t have internally, increasing your IT intelligence quotient.
You can make better use of physical resources, too. Rather than spending money on building new data centers, you can convert the old ones to other uses. Or get rid of them, eliminating the cost of upkeep and other overhead.
It's scalable.
One of the greatest advantages of data center outsourcing is that you always have the resources you need to meet the inevitable fluctuations of business life. Data volumes and storage capacity requirements that rise and fall – sometimes rapidly – are never a problem. You don’t have to maintain too-large capacity “just in case.” Neither are you hampered by lack of resources when you face a critical growth opportunity.
And as your company grows, data center outsourcing can match it stride for stride. You can take comprehensive advantage of the latest technologies right now, and be in position to quickly capture new technology-based opportunities as they emerge. That’s competitive advantage, and that’s no expense.
Data center outsourcing is an investment in your company’s future.
Even if you’re at the top of your game right now – the lead dog in front of a highly competitive pack – you won’t remain there without diligent effort. And since IT provides the foundation for everything your people do, throughout your enterprise, your decisions are fundamentally mission-critical.
Data center outsourcing could make the difference between a continued bright future and one that’s lackluster. Is that an investment, or an expense?
Photo credit: lucidtech via Flickr
