Major IT transformation projects: the big questions

Technological innovation creates opportunities for businesses to become more agile, more intelligent in the way they approach their markets and operations, more open-for-business and more efficient in execution. With this, corporate stakeholders’ business expectations increase. Globalisation continues to drive the competitive landscape, and the stress on the bottom line demands tighter budgets.

Where once upon a time, the focus to alleviate these pressures would have fallen on the finance department, increasingly organisations are turning to IT for a solution. IT transformation is both a buzzword and a source of many sleepless nights. Plenty has been written on how to approach the challenge and there are some common themes that emerge. A familiar call is for C-suite backing and involvement, from CEO down, due to the significance and business impact on the success or otherwise of the project.

IT transformation projects frequently include modernising IT infrastructure as a key step in the process, it’s also likely the new set up will incorporate the cloud, all of which means that there has to be an audit and review of what the company currently has and how and where it is sited.

What you need to ask

In our experience, when we’ve been approached by Enterprise organisations or third party consultants faced with an IT transformation project, there are concerns about how, when and why they should move their kit. Do they consolidate, design and then move? Do they deal with the apps first, then the hardware? How do they ensure it doesn’t all fall over when they move? If they move now and consolidate later, will they be empty nesters, upsizing just as the children move out, paying for more space and power than they need?

That might be the case with many data centre providers, but Datum’s strength, above our high quality, highly resilient, ultra-secure facility, is our approach to client service. Datum’s business model isn’t based on the landlord/tenant equation. We are a service-based business reliant on long term client relationships, which means we depend on satisfied clients.

Because Datum’s colocation service is priced on power consumed, not on space occupied, and because Datum works with clients to develop contracts that fit their needs, clients can shift their kit from multiple locations into our data centre before progressing to the application level. After rationalisation, built in flexibility enables a reduction in both space occupied and power consumption, opening up the capacity to attract other organisations into the hall.

Datum’s wide range of carriers and options for direct connectivity to both public and private cloud platforms support hybrid cloud strategies. Our data centre location outside the M25 in a highly secure park helps ensure a reliable, fit for purpose data centre that will provide the foundation for the whole transformation project.