Data Center Services: Your New Home

Away from Home – Top 10 Things You Need to Know

Top 10 Factors in Choosing a Third-party Data Center

How do you find a third-party datacenter that cares about data security, application performance and uptime reliability as much as you do? Here are 10 tips to help you choose the best one for you.

Get physical:

#1

It should be as hard for people to get into the datacenter as it is for data to get out. Look for multi-layer physical security and authentication, 24/7/365 monitoring inside and out by trained professionals, video surveillance, biometric readers, access control policies. Leave nothing to doubt.

There’s much more to choosing the right provider than cost. Start with what you need to achieve… security, uptime, tiered storage, 30-minute recovery, scalability. It doesn’t matter what the cost is if you end up paying the price later in other more hurtful ways.

What’s in Your Wallet?

#2

#3

The Man Behind the Curtain Who is behind the technology you’re entrusting your assets to? One of the biggest outsourcing benefits is having continual access to advanced, reliable technologies. Be sure your provider has it, or works with the best partners to get it.

Not My Fault:Selecting a provider in an earthquake zone is a bad idea. But weather and geographic proclivities are just a few location considerations. Equally important can be distance, power availability, multiple Internet and comms suppliers, post-disaster physical accessibility, or extended stay.

#4

Double Good:Two being better than one is certainly true in datacenters. Otherwise there’d be single points of failure. Critical facility components (i.e. generators, UPS and cooling) must be redundant. Besides uptime, redundancy allows for preventative maintenance on one system while the other carries the load.

#5

We Got This:Who, if anyone, is watching out for you? Uptime reliability and issue prevention require full-time monitoring. Automation is fine, but there still needs to be eyes, hands and brains to take remedial action quickly, or escalate to someone who can.

#6

When additional computing power, bandwidth or storage is needed suddenly, the data center must have the capacity to assign more resources to accommodate business spikes as they happen.

No “No Vacancy”:

#7

When you entrust mission-critical data to a third party, you expect the provider to be as dynamic, agile and flexible as your business is, if not more so. You are choosing a partner. They must be able to function at the speed of business… your business.

Bend Over Backward:

#8

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the parameters and responsibilities of the relationship between you and your provider. Without a clear and concise SLA, performance criteria, uptime commitments, penalties, and accountabilities may be open to debate after it’s too late.

Better than the Paper It’s Written On

#9

Trying to describe a true business partnership never measures up to actually being in one. Your vendor is there for you, anytime, all the time. It wants to know your business and your challenges and be a strategic contributor to both. It measures its success by your success.

Is Anybody Home?

#10

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