Reliable Systems

Right now, the power is out at my home. That doesn’t happen often - in fact, it’s been almost two years since we lost power long enough for my UPS to shut down my home network. Normally this would be a small inconvenience, but I still host a few things for my wife out of my house which are now down. The largest of these is a fairly popular forum for an author she likes, but there are other sites as well.

Why am I still hosting these at home? Really there’s no reason - I’ve shifted hosting for my personal services out to other providers, and our company services are also hosted by hosting companies. I just haven’t moved her stuff out of my house.

We talk with a lot of small and medium sized businesses that are still hosting all of their own services internally for pretty much the same reasons - they originally had them in house when they were much smaller and the market was different, and haven’t considered what it would mean to have those computers live somewhere else. It’s time for a change.

Why It’s time to Use the Cloud

You should look at all of your important business services - things that your business can’t operate without - and work out a plan to no longer host those items in your facility. As a first step, just consider what it means to provide the same applications and services, but have the computers not live within your company. The main goals for moving these services out are:

1. Business Agility: When you use a hosting company it’s easier to change capacity as your needs change, even to bring services up temporarily as a trial run and then shut them down if they don’t pan out. This makes it easy to experiment with new software technology without the traditional problems of hosting getting in the way.
2. Low Cost Reliability: If you want those services available, the cost to outfit a room to provide redundant cooling and power for a single rack of equipment is easily $50,000. To host one rack of equipment in a basic Tier-2 data center can cost around $1,500 to $3000 a month, which includes power and Internet. At that rate, how quickly will you get an ROI on your facility investment?
3. Improved Focus: Getting this equipment out of your shop improves your focus on the things you really need to be spending time on: Projects for the business and end-user support. The rest of it is overhead.
4. Access from Anywhere: When you set up your services so they can live in the cloud and be used from your office, it’s easy to make those same services available to employees from home and from laptops. Not as second class citizens but with all of the ranks and privileges of being in the office. This helps you leverage employee talent wherever it is. It’s also easier to set up rock-solid extranet access for customers and suppliers.

When you start looking at each thing you provide as a service, you might also find that some of them - like Microsoft Exchange - really aren’t worth hosting yourself at all even in a data center, and it’d be ultimately in your best interest to outsource it entirely to a hosted Exchange provider. There are number that can do this very effectively. While the cost may seem high based on what it cost you to purchase your initial Exchange licenses, when you look at the real cash costs for Exchange over two to three years they are very cost effective.

Once you’ve taken the step of taking an existing service and outsourced it entirely, you might even consider a Software as a Service offering for some of your core services (such as a hosted CRM). This is the most aggressive mode of outsourcing and does create a set of unique risks and opportunities.

But I can’t See It

Two common objections we hear from IT administrators about moving services out of their shop, even if it’s just relocating servers into a data center. is that it will make it hard for them to get upgrades when necessary because the business won’t be able to see & feel the new equipment. Out of sight, out of mind as the saying goes. The second main objection is that the IT administrators want to be able to do a laying of hands on the equipment to maintain it. There’s a comfort factor in knowing you can walk into a room and flip the power switch or move a drive or just bask in the warm glow of blinking lights.

Here’s the good news: Both of these reasons are not only suspect in their own right, but are preventing your shop from getting to the next level in IT’s relationship with the business.

First, even though vendors do a good job of making server hardware look serious and fun, in the end it’s just a business appliance: It either is good enough to deliver for the business or it isn’t. With rare exception, there is no extra business value for it to look good, new, or cool. If you find that you need to show the business physical servers to explain your costs, you’re missing out on the critical opportunity to establish a real partnership between business and IT. You need to be sure you’re spending when it’s time to spend and saving when it’s time to save, and have discussions in the language the business would use for any other service it would acquire.

Second, If your IT administration patterns and practices require routinely touching your physical infrastructure then you need to re-examine them. It generally means you either have equipment that is no longer up to the task or that you’re not doing enough automation of IT tasks. If you have trouble-prone hardware, it’s time to either fix the fundamental issue or ditch the hardware. Ironically, this type of problem is often easier in a hosted environment because it generally isn’t your problem: it’s the hosting company’s.

Automation is essential because humans are the most error-prone part of any standard process. Your routine IT administration time shouldn’t be going to consistent tasks - they should be automated, leaving your time for user support and other business value-add services. That’s right - even in your shop with your existing staff you can find more time to spend on projects instead of support events by automating recurring tasks.

Some Things Still Stay

There are some things that should be on site for performance reasons. Regardless of how big your Internet connection is, you’re going to want basic file and printer sharing services to be local. Depending on the size of your site, you’ll probably also want a directory server for whatever your directory system is (e.g. Microsoft Active Directory). Even here the central services help: If you have a reasonable Internet connection, you can have your local file server back itself up to the data center by using one of a few distributed backup systems (such as Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager or a third-party option like NSI Software’s Double-Take). This eliminates the time and attention that local disk backups require.

Perhaps not Now, but Soon - and For the Rest of Your Life

It may not be appropriate to move a number of your services outside yet; If you have only one business site, light access by employees externally, and aren’t expecting that to change then you can host most things yourself. A number of the considerations still apply - but you might just use an external facility for your public web presence and for backing up your essential data for business continuity.

Even if you don’t do much now, you should find some opportunity to put a service outside so you and your company can gain experience at working with external hosting providers and you’ll stay current on the capabilities and costs so that as new business requirements evolve you’re ready to take care of them. You’ll be in a better position to advise your company on when to move things out of the shop, and as you do you’ll discover that instead of focusing your time and talent inward at the routine operations of infrastructure you’ll have time for those projects that really make a difference to your business.

How Has the Cloud Delivered For You?

Have a story about what has and hasn’t worked with hosting? Drop me a line or post a comment to share it.