IDG research: How to build the in-house team you need to perform a perfect colocation migration

We recently worked with the renowned analyst group IDG to interview data centre managers about their current data centre colocation usage and the challenges of migration.

The report is very useful in order to get a feel for people’s real experiences of migration, as well as what businesses should be demanding from their suppliers. We also asked the same people what they feel should be the ideal composition of their internal team to get the most from their migration and new suppliers.

The results are fascinating. As you might expect, most people said IT should take a leadership role. But what’s really interesting is that over half of our respondents also said that their CEO should be involved - they’re keen to make sure that the COO, facilities management and finance teams all play their parts too.

In addition, about a third said legal teams and an independent project manager should be involved as well.

What this all tells us is that data centre transformation is now very much being viewed as a strategic business decision. This is in contrast to the recent past where the responsibility for the data centre was placed somewhere between FM and IT.

Today however, the IDG research tells us that things have changed significantly; for example, just 5% now believe FM should lead the project to move to a new colocation provider.

As the IDG report says, “this is another indicator that often today the data centre is the heartbeat or mission-control system of the organisation, and should not just be viewed as a real estate asset or sunk cost.”

This was a view echoed by Colo-X CEO Tim Anker when we interviewed him recently, who explained why his clients are choosing to move to colocation:

“There are many different drivers. Office relocation is a big one. Organisations often see it as an obvious time to take the opportunity to finally move their IT into a third party environment specifically designed to house it. Other times you will see people look at colo as an option is when they’re going through mergers or demergers. Then there’s moving to a new hardware platform, adopting virtualisation or third party cloud services. These can be triggers too.” Another key driver can be when legacy server rooms and data centres no longer meet the demands of the organisation, as written about in an article available here.

To get more insight on the all the factors you need to consider when migrating your IT to colocation environment, download the IDG report today.