10 Lesser-Known Things About Data Centers Every CIO Must Know

Your data center has a direct impact on the performance and profitability of your organization. If you are a CIO or a data center manager, you need to know certain things about the data center in your organization, how it affects the business operations, and what are your responsibilities towards the performance of your organization.

Given below are the top 10 things you should know about the data center in your organization. Before that, read about the potential challenges related to data centers and how to solve them.

1.    Total Cost of Ownership

More often than not, CIOs are seen miscalculating the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). You may miss some of the factors that are necessary to be considered while calculating TCO. Make sure to consider everything including design, construction, maintenance, equipment, labor, power, cooling, and monitoring.

2.    Data Center Needs for Your Business

From why is your organization using a data center in the first place to what will be your organization’s future data center needs, being a CIO you need to be aware of this and everything in between. Also, make sure to plan on the things that should be done for ensuring high performance and scalability to accommodate the growing demands of your firm.

3.    Knowing Your Business Critical Applications

You can easily end up thinking that all applications that are running in your organization are critical to your business operations. This might not always be true. There are certain applications that are of primary importance and with even a few minutes of downtime, it might cause a huge loss to your business. For example, if yours is an e-commerce business, then your website is your business critical application. Rests of them are of secondary importance.

4.    Evaluating Potential Outages

Knowing your data center’s susceptibility to outages will help you be ready to handle the potential outages. For this, you need to be aware of the way your data center is designed and the way it operates. Getting into the roots of both these things will help you effectively mitigate any potential outages even before they occur.

5.    How to Handle Outages

After you’ve studied your business’ data center needs, critical applications, and the potential causes of outages, you need to start plotting strategies and efficient ways to handle potential outages, as well as eliminate the possibilities of sudden outages. Next, start tracking your efforts, measuring the results, and making further improvements into it.

6.    How to Measure the Cost of Outages

Although knowing the actual cost of a potential outage is practically impossible, knowing the estimated cost of an outage for your business by getting as close to it as you can is the best way to make informed decisions and mitigate the effects of an outage effectively.

7.    Having a Disaster Recovery Process in Place

You as a CIO, it is crucial for you to have a precise disaster recovery plan specific to your business in place. And not only the plan but the entire process should be mapped around it and shared with the personnel in question. This process should also be tested to work at the time of an unplanned data center failure.

8.    Data Center Management Best Practices

Apart from applications and outages, you need to also pay close heed to the data center management and adhere to the best practices. You need to be cognizant of the different components, software, and hardware involved in the data center management process.

9.    Complexities of Adapting to the New technology

With newer technology coming up in the data center market, you need to stay updated, know what can be changed, and how will it be beneficial for your business’ growth. Switching technology and adapting to it is not as easy as it might seem, so make sure you’re ready for it well in advance. Learn about Blockchain Technology and its Impact on the Data Center Infrastructure.

10.   Keep Learning and Implementing

In today’s fast growing world, continuous learning and updating your knowledge base is not an option, it’s a must to help you succeed. Make sure you follow the relevant forums, news, seminars, and conferences to stay updated and informed. Learn about the advantages of water-cooled data centers. Can you implement it for your business?  

Of course, no one can know everything about data centers and IT infrastructure. But being a CIO, knowing the above things will prove to be immensely beneficial for you. If you already know most of these, then you’re almost there, if not, find the answers here and it’ll help you be at the top of your game!

And if you’re looking for the best data center design and construction solutions in India, then Prasa Infocom and Power Solutions is where you need to head to. We are a dedicated team of full-fledged data center consultants, engineers, and design experts that offer data center and other mission-critical infrastructure services for all your business needs.