As recently as two years ago, the idea of hiring someone to manage your data center remotely was a daring, almost dangerous concept. It was one thing to outsource application development to India; it was quite another to give someone there the keys to the heart of your customer database or transaction-processing system.
But the boundaries of IT comfort have always moved outward in discrete steps, from glass-house mainframes and workgroup minicomputers to shared services, and the eventual outsourcing of those shared services. The concept of remote data-center management is just the last in a line of inevitable steps. Concerns about multiple issues have abated, whether they related to broadband availability, network reliability (latency is minimal, sources say, even from the other side of the world), or management-application stability (BMC, Computer Associates, HP and IBM, all offer mature management tools). Thus, “Executives — at both service vendors and within potential customers — are re-thinking how IT infrastructure services can be delivered. These changes are re-shaping the marketplace, and we’re expecting significant growth in the next three to five years,” says Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO, Everest Group, an outsourcing advisory firm in Dallas, TX. The efficiencies are simple, “If I’ve got five data centers, and I can run them with a pool of administrators based in a single location, I require fewer administrators,” says Rick Sturm, President, Enterprise Management Associates, a consulting firm in Boulder, Colo. “They’re also busier, because they’re not spending as much time waiting for the next event,” he says.
Couple that with traditional-outsourcing savings, and then stand back. Customers of Indian service providers report savings of more than 50% when outsourcing infrastructure services to an India center, wrote Lance Travis, VP, Outsourcing Strategies, AMR Research, an analyst firm in Boston, Mass., in a 2004 report on the topic. A 2005 Gartner report predicts that while currently no more than 5% of organizational spending can be attributed to externally sourced shared-IT solutions, by 2010, that proportion will have grown to almost 25%
No outsourcing project is throw-it-over-the-wall simple — this is a certainty that applies especially to data-center management. To successfully embark on such a project, consider not just the technological advancements, but also the governance issues involved — agreement on everything from the standards you’ll rely on, what will be the in-service-level agreements, and how your staff and the outsourcers’ staff will collaborate, now and in the future.
Standard Practices
Remote data-center management seems to be one area in IT, where the standards have preceded widespread adoption. The most popular — the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) — covers key issues for infrastructure management: configuration management, problem and change management, help desk, software control and distribution, service-level management, capacity management, contingency planning, availability management, and cost management for IT services.
“Standards are a good thing for several reasons,” says AMR’s Travis. “You’re getting the collective wisdom of the work that went into developing the standard. It also gives you a common terminology and framework to discuss the management process and avoid misunderstandings,” he notes. “It also protects your outsourcing investment. If everyone uses ITIL, it makes it easier to move from one outsourcer to another.”
Even so, don’t fall prey to an over-reliance on general standards. Specific industries may have specialized standards governing certain processes, warns Rakesh Singh, Head-Strategic Relations, HCL Technologies, an outsourcing vendor in Delhi, India, citing both telecommunications and discrete manufacturing as two verticals where ITIL doesn’t fulfill all necessary processes. He also suggests the awareness of where standard processes in one vertical can be adapted, to fill a need in another one.
Working Together
The fundamentals of SLAs don’t change when you think about remote data-center management, but experts insist that you have to know your baseline statistics before you can ask someone else to take them over.Added to these common issues are the concepts of escalation, security, governance, and collaboration — all of which need to be discussed and determined in preparation for a handoff. Here are some considerations to cover in these areas
Event Escalation
If there’s a problem, who’s responsible for it initially? How long should a service provider try to fix it before escalating to a second-tier within his organization, or a third-tier within your organization? What’s the chain of command? Who are the backups and what are their preferred methods of communication (beeper, e-mail, instant messaging)? Determining a communication flow, based on responsibilities and time of day can save time and angst in due course.
SecurityHow does the outsourcing firm handle security, both from a physical and technological aspect? You want to be sure that a hacker can’t spoof his way into your system via the service provider’s network; you also want to make sure that an employee working for one client can’t necessarily access another client’s system, either by logging into it remotely or accessing it physically. PR Krishnan, Head, IT Infrastructure Services, Tata Consulting Services in Chennai, India, notes that his company segregates data-center employees from accessing other clients’ data in a variety of ways, including limited access to specific floors and buildings, requiring passwords for data access, installing firewalls and encrypting data.
Management
Your ongoing governance model should be the result of initial communications covering your needs and expectations. How long is it going to take the outsourcer to be up-and-running? How frequently will the parties convene to review concerns — or more likely, what issues will be discussed weekly. and which will be handled on a monthly or quarterly basis?
Tata’s Krishnan estimates that the transition should take no more than a month, and a firm governance model should be in place no later than six months from the start of the project, with the model revisited on a quarterly basis. But for clients who prefer to be more hands-on in the interim, he also notes that by using Web-based portals, his firm can post up-to-the-minute metrics for anyone within the client organisation, who wants to track such information. Yet, he stresses the need for a discussion on update frequency.
