Every business is striving to expand its customer base and revenues. Along with growth, businesses face challenges of securely storing their data in data center. The implementation of innovative ideas is one source of data growth, such as deploying new resource-intensive applications.

This is how IT needs to vary for different companies, however, there is one basic question that all of them should answer before moving ahead:

Should I build my own data center or buy it from specialized providers?

Building your data center

The drawback for in-house data centers is the lack of resources and expertise. Companies need proper equipment, space, and a lot of power for keeping an in-house data center. Sometimes, they even don’t manage to use them properly when the resources reach their limits. Here, IT professionals start to consider whether it’s worth considering the following things:

• Invest in maintaining an in-house data center
• Use a collocation center solution to house hardware
• Lease data space from a data center provider
• Start seeking the services of the cloud or virtualized colocation

Another challenge for building a data center is that it’s difficult to determine the future needs. Unless the data center isn’t the core of your business, it shouldn’t require so much commitment. On the other hand, with the less knowledge, experience, and commitment you won't be efficiently maintaining your data center. Partnering with a trusted hosting service provider will be a good decision for SME in most cases. It will allow businesses to free up their time and resources, allowing them to focus on the further development of their company.

There is a range of factors managers must consider before making decisions. This includes the cost types that you should weight before choosing to build a data center or use the service of external data center provider.

• 100% uptime cost: Today, for every business service uptime matters the most since it directly influences your ability to attract new customers. It may require experienced IT staff, which is not something small and medium sized businesses can afford.
• IT Staff cost: Staffing good employees, especially in the IT sphere, is often an overlooked cost. Don’t think of IT staff only in terms of salary. Usually, good staff requires significant investment in healthcare, 401K, computing equipment, certifications and licenses, trainings, etc.
• Building cost: Building an in-house data-center requres a lot of capital investments such as tenant improvements, uninteraptable power systems, DC battery plans, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems to cool the servers, storage, networking equipment, and so on. All these expenses take the company's resources away from its core business.
• Downtime cost: Network disruption may cause a company to even go out from business. If you want to succeed in customer service and data security, which are major factors of today’s businesses, you should guarantee that your data center is prepared to ensure continued information availability.
• Customers’ expectations: Any service latency may affect business performance in terms of decreased productivity, customer churn, and lost revenues. To keep customers satisfied, businesses need a reliable and scalable data-center with minimum downtime.
• Industry flexibility: Not all companies from several industries have ultimate freedom to choose the option that is more flexible or cost-effective. Typically, those are the companies and organizations that need to be compliant with lots of government regulations and procedures such as medical clinics and financial services.

Today, data is a critical asset for virtually any business. The need for storing and maintaining an ever-increasing amount of data is growing exponentially. Before deciding whether to own a data center or switch to a service provider, it’s important to thourougly analyze both options and go for the one that best suits your business needs. Generally, the right decision is the one that will maximize the organization’s data storage and minimize the totalcostofownership. Simply put, businesses should compare the cost of maintaining an in-house data center with that of renting a data-center from service providers.

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