JULY, 202419to be handled, data centers do invariably need humans to be present, in addition to the security and perimeter guarding.During February 2019, online and mobile banking systems of a major bank in Europe went offline due to a melt-down of their data center. They had to shut down one of their data center facilities due to smoke. It took two days to bring the facility back up, with significant effort which required physical presence of data center staff.Imagine this happened during the times of Covid. The time taken to fix the issue would have increased exponentially due to lack of resources and their hesitation to collaborate in person. Even physical security may get compromised in this situation which may be of grave concern.The Pandemic | Humans | Data Centers | Business | EconomyThis world has already witnessed several severe global disasters than Covid (by the time this article was written). Spanish Flu, Russian Flu, Cholera, Yellow Fever, Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu etc., in the distant past and SARS, MERS and Swine Flu in the recent times. While the gravity and scale of those outbreaks might be mightier than Corona viruses, the effect of the latter is of prodigious scale, thanks to the continuously shrinking globe.As the civilization is now more dependent on Information Technology than ever, data centers have become the substratum of the humanity. They need to be continuously supervised and constantly cared and that invariably needs human presence. In short, data centers need people.It is worthwhile to note couple of key findings from Uptime Institute's 2019 Data Center Survey in this context.· The staffing problem affecting most of the data center sector has become a crisis. Sixty-one percent (61%) of respondents said they had difficulty retaining or recruiting staff -- up from 55% a year earlier.· Outages continue to cause significant problems for operators. Just over a third (34%) of all respondents had an outage or severe IT service degradation in the past year, while half (50%) had an outage or severe IT service degradation in the past three years.· Ten percent (10%) of all respondents said that their most recent significant outage cost more than $1 million ("most recent" could have been at any time in the past).So what is the alternative?. Off-load the risk of maintaining the data centers and there is no better choice than CLOUD... Why?..· They have mastered the art of managing the scale· There is more automation behind the scene so less human-touch· Even the staff deployment in cloud data centers can leverage the advantage of economies of scale· It is much easier to manage the situations in pockets of focused zones than wide-spread areas· Their perimeter and physical security tend to be more robust and proven than what enterprises can affordWith many proven methods and tools, migration to cloud isn't difficult. With careful optimization approach, cloud may be found cost effective than those capex-hungry data centers.Even in the context of Corona Virus - Digital Platforms running on cloud is making things easier given the centralized control. For ex., ServiceNow is offering free access to apps for the Governments to respond faster in situations like this. Google made a limited time free offer for their hangouts and video conference services to their G-Suite customers. Zoom is offering their video conferencing and sharing service free educational institutions. LinkedIn is offering 16 learning courses for free.Now is your business case to adopt cloud as a Digital Platform much stronger now?.For a Fortune 500 American Healthcare company, Cognizant transformed their workloads resilient by modernizing on AWS, shut down four data centers and reduced TCO by 40% through a self-service platform. Raja Renganathan, Former Senior Cloud Executive, Digital Influencer
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