8102019 Computerworld 20130408 Pulling the Plug on Small in House Data Centers

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IRTUALIZATION AND CLOUD SERVICES are making iteasier for companies to shift IT infrastructure opera-tions to service providers and that is exactly whatmany organizations are doing

The trend is most prevalent among small and

midsize companies many of which are shutting down internalsystems and shifting IT workloads to external providers becausethey want to save money and because theyrsquore concerned that it

will become difficult to find people with theskills necessary to run data centers

Large public- and private-sector orga-nizations have been consolidating datacenters for years by better optimizing in-house operations the federal governmentfor example is shutting down hundreds ofdata centers But most of those enterprisesonly use cloud services at the margins

ldquoWe are definitely seeing a trend away

from in-house data centers toward external

data centers external provisioningrdquo saidGartner analyst Jon Hardcastle

Insurer OneAmerica is transferring itsdata center operations to a service pro-

vider because itrsquos concerned that one dayit wonrsquot be able to replace the experts whorun its vital systems said CIO Gene Berry

By June the company expects to com-plete the transfer of all of its IT servicesto T Systems North America whilecutting the size of its internal data centerto 2000 square feet from 25000 squarefeet The in-house facility will mostlysupport networking and will be managedby T Systems

OneAmerica once employed about 65people in its data center and used about18 technologies In some cases only oneor two people had the expertise to main-tain specialized systems ldquoThat gave us alot of concern long-termrdquo said Berry ldquoWedidnrsquot have the ability to hire backupsrdquo

Hagen Wenzek CTO at IPG Media-brands which manages InterpublicGroups media assets also cited concernsabout potential brain drain as a reason forshifting management of the companyrsquosSQL Server and SharePoint systems tomanaged services provider Avanade

ldquoI canrsquot hire enough experts willing to work for a media companyrdquo said Wenzeknoting that most people with the skills

he needs would rather work for tech vendors Avanade boosted the performance

of the Microsoft technology that IPGMediabrands uses and improved deliveryof reports said Wenzek IPG Mediabrandshas since shifted the focus of its IT hiringefforts to recruiting business analysts who

can work with data and visualization tools he addedHank Seader managing principal of the Uptime Institute said

that it takes a ldquocertain set of legacy skills a certain commitment tothe less-than-glorious career fields to make data centers work anditrsquos hard to find people to do itrdquo

Do in-house data centers have a future ldquoI think only [at] thereally large companiesrdquo said Berry ldquo[at] smaller companies nordquo

Meanwhile the closing of data centers has become a significantconcern for IT professionals Jobs with thebest career paths are moving from datacenters to fast-growing service providers

For instance IT hosting company Rack-space plans to hire 1000 new employeesover the next two years In the 2012Rackspace annual report executives toldinvestors that demand is growing in partbecause smaller companies lack the IT staffto manage infrastructure operations and

donrsquot want to buy new equipment 983157

NEWS ANALYSIS

6 C O M P U T E R W O R L D A P R I L 8 2 0 1 3

Pulling the Plug on SmallIn-house Data CentersAs IT workers with key skills grow scarce and the costs ofupgrading data centers rise many CIOs are replacing in-houseops with cloud-based servicesBy Patrick Thibodeau

TH I NK S TOCK

I canrsquot hire enough experts

willing to work for a mediacompanyrdquomdash HAGEN WENZEK CTO

IPG MEDIABRANDS

NEWS ANALYSIS