We hear talk about big data shifting more and more to cloud based companies rather than stored in physical hard drives inside a company’s facility. When you know what’s at stake, it’s really not surprising that many organizations still prefer to keep their data servers onsite.

You may hear that the need for in-house data centers is shrinking. When considering the impact of leveraging important digital assets, many organizations prefer to keep their data servers onsite, in data centers within the facility. Digital assets are built around the workload and stored information that is the life blood to each company’s business.

Using the cloud for offsite digital storage or high speed access can make sense for some functions within an organization, as these activities can quickly overwhelm an in-house data center infrastructure. As these workloads are transferred to the cloud, you need to consider that some of these workloads sometimes contain sensitive data—and a lot of it. This fact makes it important to support the security and maintenance of crucial company data that onsite data centers can provide. Additionally, the maturity of the cloud (i.e. it is still fairly new) as well as the cost of maintaining it has made it a bit out of reach for some organizations. When comparing cost models, some companies may realize the benefit vs. cost of controlling your digital assets may be clear. What you need in terms of storage, if you need to access your data at peak computing times, and how safe does this data need to be are all important considerations when making the decision to what data is better served offsite or in an onsite data center.

Reasons for Running Big Data Servers On-Premises

Some organizations, such as data management companies, predicted that all of their work will be contained in the cloud, only to learn that upwards of 90 percent of their deployments run on-premises. Having this data onsite is due to security reasons, as well as the sheer capacity of some of these data storage needs. For instance, organizations that have a lot of data—the government, financial services, telephone and cable companies, etc.—find it more efficient to keep their data management onsite, rather than outsourcing that storage to the cloud. These organizations have huge investments in their data centers onsite, and thus have no real need to move the data management job elsewhere. In other words, big data is more easily managed in onsite data centers for these businesses and organizations. Smaller companies also realize that in order to make sure their servers are running at all times, having an in-house data center makes maintaining servers easier to do and provides a faster way to fix server problems.

Shying Away from the Cloud

In a survey completed by Enterprise Strategy Group, only 21 percent of respondents said they were considering using the public cloud for their data management system—that leaves a lot of organizations that are committed to keeping their data servers onsite, in dedicated data centers. Still, installing and housing a data center infrastructure should be measured against whether it can be scaled up or down, whether it offers adequate performance, and whether it’s cost effective for your business needs.

Is your organization transitioning to the cloud or keeping data centers onsite? FabraCraft manufactures easy to install data center enclosures that can be scaled to any room size and added to for expansion, as your needs grow. Call us at 800-637-7487 and let us help you design an in-house data center enclosure in your facility.