SYSTEMS INTEGRATORS: THREE S A CLOUD INFOPAPER

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1 SYSTEMS INTEGRATORS: THREE S A CLOUD INFOPAPER

2 Introduction There is one thing that people can bet their mortgages on, and that is that technology won t stand still. For Systems Integrators (SI s) whose expertise lies in the management of outsourced IT infrastructure, it means their role is constantly changing - not only because of the speed of developments in technology, but also because clients have ever-increasing expectations. The right IT infrastructure provides a significant competitive advantage, so SIs must continue to develop their specialist know-how. Cloud strategies are compounding the situation and they will be the most challenging business driver in the years to come. It is a disruptive technology that is being used to differentiate and innovate, leaving IT directors and CIOs with sprawling environments that need to be managed and ever-more complicated relationships between systems and applications. To help manage the complexity, many SI s have provided their own data centres as part of their asset portfolio, but lack of investment has led to expensive-to-run and inefficient facilities that don t deliver the level of service that today s enterprises need. This has led to inflexible contracts because SI s have tied customers to fixed footprints; Cloud, virtualisation and consolidation aren t considerations. Today, businesses are demanding flexible and agile IT services. The growing trend is for SIs and Managed Service providers to move away from in-house built data centres and to move to enterprise edge data centres to better position themselves in today s hybrid IT world. - Roy Wood, Senior Consultant at Advanced 365 Evolution of data centre capacity over 20 years MW 5MW 10MW 17MW 30MW

3 What Enterprises want from Systems Integrators There is no doubt that enterprises will continue to value and need SIs, which is supported by numerous industry analyst reports showing market growth. But, as with any industry, SIs must listen to their customers if they are to survive and grow. So, what do enterprises want from SIs? In essence, they value how SI manages their IT for, BUT, they also want:- More flexibility in how their processes are used and managed Lower total cost of service (TCS) through using a third-party data centre provider Increased consumption efficiency by pushing workloads into private/ public cloud

4 1 Flexibility Change is still a key theme here; the data storage and infrastructure needs and expectations of businesses are evolving and the data centre market has matured. Buying colocation space is becoming the strategy of choice for many SIs due to the increasing need of their customers to be on-ramp to cloud. Purchasing space brings additional benefits such as provider expertise, IT ownership, huge access to carriers, availability of contiguous spacing, no capital cost, lower Total Cost of Service (TCS), an ecosystem of partners and a predictable operational expenditure model. Cloud and colocation offerings can be modelled to suit any SIs customer s business objective including rapid growth, consolidation, simplification, mobilisation or simply cost reduction. But to remain competitive, SIs must ensure that the data centres they use are capable of delivering not only a clear on-ramp to cloud, but also first class colocation services with flexible contract options. Overly rigid long-term data centre contracts are no longer palatable for many global cloud and digital businesses where the fast pace of business and technology can require organisations to change direction quickly. It is the same for SIs. If organisations are held back by antiquated and inflexible platforms or contracts that can t react quickly in line with business plans, it can lead to missed business opportunities and severe IT cost inefficiencies. Flexible contract options provide true commercial and technical agility which benefit SIs and ultimately their customers. They enable SIs to use information provided by Data Centre Information Management (DCIM) tools to ensure they match colocation spend with customer requirements and predict current and future commitment levels. The ability to flex the contracted power, space and time of the service at any point allows SIs to take full advantage of the differing costs per compute as they increase or decrease IT density, which can potentially save millions of pounds over the life of some contracts in unnecessary space and power charges.

5 2 Cost efficiency Of course SIs provide enterprises with valuable expertise in delivering applications in the most streamlined manner. But it can be done more effectively and flexibly if the SI uses a third party edge data centre. By engaging with a third party specialist, they can have an agreement that can novate according to their, and their customers needs, but still have direct commercial control for the overall risk strategy. The largest OPEX will likely be ingress or egress of workloads, allowing costs to be kept to a minimum whilst achieving real flexibility and portability as well as streamlined commercials. The best solution is for enterprises to have a direct contract with the data centre provider to take their colocation space and have the SI sit in that space to still manage their IT (i.e. novate their contract). The SI can then lose the cost of operating their own data centres and gain a much more resilient, agile, optimised and cost-effective IT offering. However, the ability to forecast and understand Total Cost of Serviced (TCS) goes far beyond simple capital expenditure. Typically, data centres have charged expensive rates because overheads made high prices necessary. However, by taking a smarter approach to building, cooling and running facilities, providers can significantly reduce overheads and pass the cost savings on to customers. But even data centres that were built 12 months ago are unlikely to offer the dramatic cost efficiencies that newer data centres achieve in running overheads such as cooling technologies. Modern data centres should be hyper efficient and provide a Data Centre Information Management (DCIM) capability - including power usage to-the-rack information - as part of a standard service. DCIM can provide the same level of control over a data centre deployment as if it were owned.

6 3 Pushing workloads into private/public cloud The challenges of cloud may seem daunting, but as the industry value-chain realigns around new models of IT service delivery, there are opportunities for SIs that are willing to reinvent themselves to meet new customer expectations. Organisations could just live in the public cloud world, but companies of any significant size don t. Businesses use public clouds for access to huge amounts of data and massive compute capability for on demand computing when needed or simply for storage. But they still maintain their own private clouds as a way of processing and adding value to their own sensitive data that they collect and to handle complex computations. This is the hybrid world that is becoming the de facto standard. Bringing cloud services to an enterprise s own building has challenges that can be avoided by making use of the services from within the data centres where the clouds live. Being located in the same building means the cloud services are a simple cross connect away. Connectivity to the right carriers is critical if cloud is to work. It ensures that multiple public clouds can be accessed, which will increase performance. SIs should be aware that whilst some data centre providers can build the best high performance computing platform and a facility that is cost effective to run, without connectivity provisioning on-ramp to other clouds, their customers won t be able to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. multi sub-duct networks so carriers can easily interconnect and businesses can cross connect to a multitude of public clouds. Those data centres that own a fully diverse fibre duct infrastructure to meet all of the fibre owner/operators make every other possible carrier or related supplier just a cross connect away providing limitless connectivity cost effectively. IoT and big data combined with machine-to-machine systems are what truly drive the need for high performance computing. As organisations begin to understand that data analytics helps them to become more relevant and innovate, the demand for data will only escalate. Machines will use collected data to drive other device performance speeding the process yet further. As a result, more industries will inevitably use public cloud to gather invaluable data, which will consequently increase the demand for more space and compute power from the data centre. In turn, even greater importance will be put on data centres - their efficiency, total cost of service and connectivity - which will be in increasing demand as the exponential rate of data continues to grow; a demand that SIs are unlikely to be able to keep pace with in their owned data centres. Specialist data centres will provide on-ramp to cloud services so enterprises have direct access to multiple clouds. Forward looking providers have made the investment of fully diverse

7 4 Added benefits The proximity of organisations that SIs can exchange information and collaborate with to add value to their services makes carefully chosen data centres an ideal base for business. If SIs chose a data centre that is building communities of cloud providers, financial services and digital media organisations, for example, they act as fertile ground for mutually beneficial relationships. These kinds of communities and ecosystems are where companies are forming partnerships for greater revenues and profitability. This will put SIs closer to their customers and partners and help them to develop and adapt their own business models as the technology landscape continues to change and choices proliferate. 1 London South 2 London Central 3 London North 4 London West 5 London East 6 Bristol 7 Liverpool 8 Guildford 9 Cambridge 10 South of Cambridge 11 Brighton 3 LONDON Jisc (the Joint Information Systems Committee) is a shared data centre facility for research and education used by approximately 20 leading UK institutions (such as Francis Crick Institute, King s College London, Imperial College, London School of Economics, The Sanger Institute, Brunel University and Liverpool City College) that take advantage of a shared IT infrastructure and high performance computing capabilities. The Institute of Cancer Research uses the shared facility to extract medical data from University College London and other such institutions, and shares the data in a way that allows them to get a better understanding of various forms of cancer and other illnesses. Jisc was a world s first, enabling universities and colleges to be more efficient and effective by increasing collaboration to push the boundaries of research. At the same time, by sharing facilities, they increase energy efficiency and reduce costs.

8 5 Future trends Data centres will soon become tri-partied; where the enterprise sits in its own environment and has access to adjoining public and private environments on the same campus footprint. We expect to see this evolving over the shortterm in line with the genuine desire to create shareholder value from front end customer facing applications, where the core back office infrastructure is supported and managed by third parties. Put simply, there is no overwhelming technological reason why SIs wouldn t outsource the data centre facility. Not only will customers applications likely be safer, faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run than in an SIs own data centre, by going the colocation/cloud route, they will actually be able to access services and applications that they simply afford to run on their own premises. Big Data is a great example. The servers, storage and networking capacity required to run a massive database search are beyond the reach of all but the few who can make money out of high performance computing infrastructure. However, renting such compute power from your colocation provider makes financial sense. And with the advent of the Internet of Things, with all of the data points to be processed, analysed and, maybe, stored just gaining momentum, why wouldn t any enterprise want access to the kind of technology and, subsequently, information, that could have a massive, positive transformational impact on so many aspects of the organisation and its customers lives? With all of this in mind, choosing to host your IT infrastructure with a colocation provider makes perfect sense, both financially and technologically.

9 Why VIRTUS: High quality at scale for sustainable competitive advantage As a data centre owner and operator, we focus on what we are good at - operating a data centre. We provide more flexibility and efficiency then any legacy data centres and reliable, secure service-led infrastructure solutions, adaptable to your business needs. At VIRTUS, you benefit from a world-class data centre offering with ISO27001 accreditation, 100% SLA on power, and some of the most highly connected data centres in greater London. Our data centres are run at a low PUE which makes them extremely energy efficient, and you and your customers will benefit from the 100% renewable energy powering their infrastructure. We are the most flexible data centre operator in London, and can scale with your business needs to cater for seasonal, event-driven or project based requirements. We specialise in offering the most bespoke solutions to SIs that require flexible infrastructure. We work with cloud-based, high tech, high growth organisations, which presents an opportunity for you to partner and connect with them in order to expand your overall portfolio for greater revenues and profitability.

10 VIRTUS offer to you Flexible portfolio of services allows you to flex up and down according to your customers needs A full range of connectivity options (including IP bandwidth, Point to Point and Point to Multipoint Ethernet connectivity, Wavelengths and Dark Fibre solutions) Unrivalled quality in service delivery 24/7 remote hands & technical support services A fully-flexible colocation contract for SIs, enabling you to add/drop services at short notice with no long term contract. This helps deliver on end user expectations to have agile IT services. About VIRTUS VIRTUS Data Centres, the UK s fastest growing data centre provider, owns, designs, builds and operates the country s most efficient and flexible data centres. VIRTUS leads the industry with award winning innovation in hyper efficient, Ultra High Density and highly interconnected facilities. Located in and around London s metro, VIRTUS offers the best of traditional retail and wholesale colocation models, combining dedicated support and complementary ecosystems with low cost, scalable and custom solutions, in uniquely flexible and customer friendly packages. Customers also benefit from Tier III certified, ultra-secure facilities, that provide 100 per cent uptime; protecting and connecting data, applications, networks and clouds within VIRTUS Data Centres and the global digital economy. For more information please go to: