Why The Data Center Will Live On

By Allan Chen, VP of Institute Technology and Chief Technology Officer, California Institute of the Arts

It has become all too easy to declare the future of data centers as doomed to go to the cloud. While, yes, the writing to shift to the cloud has become so aged on the wall as to be already faded, this is far too simple of a declaration. Even for small IT shops, which often do not have secondary “hot” sites for failover and rely heavily on outside sources, such as the cloud, for redundancy and disaster recovery, it is not easy to decide to go “all in.” 

In the long run, the writing on the wall may prove accurate to a high degree. But in today’s world, there are simply too many benefits to having at least part of one’s data center infrastructure built out locally.

Moving most or all of a data center to the cloud is indeed a very tempting proposition. However, there are many permutations of what the “cloud” means, often to the point of either several solutions, imperfect ones, or both. For example, many businesses define a “cloud-first” strategy as merely purchasing more SaaS solutions; while these are cloud-based, it does little to the existing Data Center footprint, and creates a vendor management challenge (or nightmare). Or perhaps a vendor that helps one get a particular application to the cloud has restrictions that make the process more onerous than beneficial, even in the long run. Finally, an IT team must learn an entirely new way of hosting applications, which is particularly difficult for smaller organizations. 

This is all to say that while the Data Center might be moving to the cloud, its death knell is surely premature. There are many benefits to an on-premise deployment of several solutions. A high-transaction system might benefit from the latest in converged and hyper-converged server-storage technologies, yielding localized productivity gains that other methods cannot realize. Solutions such as access control are often far more functional on a localized network, where door readers and the like have a reliable connection to their configuration server that isn’t dependent on an intermediary service such as one’s internet connection. 

In the long run, the writing on the wall may prove accurate to a high degree. But in today’s world, there are simply too many benefits to having at least part of one’s data center infrastructure built out locally. As with all cases, of course, wise and informed decision-making based on multiple factors is what will drive the best solutions.