5 Reasons to Modernise Your Data Centre

1. Give Your Business Room to Grow

To handle your growing business’s ongoing demand for storage, it’s important to advance to an infrastructure that’s flexible and can easily support expansion. By modernising your data centre with a blend of on-premise, cloud, and hybrid applications, you’ll be able to scale your storage as and when you need to. You’ll also have the option to scale down if needs be. So, unlike an aged data centre, you’ll only pay for what you use.

If you’re planning to expand your business throughout multiple offices (or if you’ve already done so), incorporating SD-WAN architecture could be highly beneficial. With SD-WANs, you’ll have the speed and intelligence needed to support modern applications throughout all branches. Not only will this provide a highly-responsive network, it’ll keep the entire organisation connected by pushing the same zero-error policy through every linked device.

2. Cut Costs and Improve ROI

Legacy data centres require power, cooling facilities and hardware maintenance, which can rack up a hefty bill. But, as modernised centres are highly virtualised, the cost of their upkeep is significantly less. Opting for a software-defined data centre will not only help you overcome the rising costs of energy, it’ll also allow you to cut back on manual labour. By integrating automation into your infrastructure, routine processes can be done instantaneously – no longer will you need to fork out for simple tasks like updating, patching and reporting.

As well as being more budget-friendly, modern data centres can generate a bigger return on investment. With a modern infrastructure, your team will have immediate access to the best, most up-to-date applications and programmes – helping you boost business performance and outshine competitors. You’ll also be able to perform tasks at a much greater speed which will increase the rate that sales can be made. Not only will tasks be completed faster, they’ll also be error-free since automation will reduce the amount of system downtime and human errors.

3. Enhance Productivity and Working Culture

Modernising your data centre opens the door to more flexible working conditions. Employees are no longer restricted to working within office hours, on office servers. Instead, they’re able to access and complete documents wherever and whenever they need to. If you choose a cloud-based infrastructure that’s fast, secure and consistently reliable, your team will be able to choose their most suitable working pattern – one that maximises productivity and diligence.

By utilising SD-WAN technology in your data centre and at branch offices, it becomes easier for teams to work collaboratively across the whole company, on all sites. Its high-speed connectivity allows multiple branches to communicate quickly and efficiently so that the handling of important projects becomes smoother with a reduced risk of errors. Big data becomes easier to share and analyse, allowing teams to use each other’s trends to strategise accordingly.

Modernisation will also reduce the management of tedious tasks, such as hardware maintenance and administration. Hybrid cloud solutions will help to replace manual steps with a deep level of orchestration and automation, drastically reducing the time to provision new applications and workloads. No longer would IT teams need to juggle excessive amounts of hardware – instead, they could use their time to drive company performance. In fact, having an updated data centre would also provide the tools and capacity to create new programmes and services, which will increase IT’s opportunity to drive business innovation.

4. Improve Data Security

Stolen data could result in a loss of customers, a damaged reputation and a high recovery fee. Yet so far in 2019, over half of UK firms have already been hit by a cyber-attack or security breach. In the digital era, it’s more important than ever to ensure your business is as secure as possible. The best way to do this is by converting your data centre into one that’s software-defined, so that your security intelligence is embedded into a layer of software rather than hardware. Unlike traditional data centres, software-defined infrastructures are automatically managed, meaning threats are instantaneously detected and aborted. Hardware defined centres, however, tend to have poorly integrated devices that each require their own management system and administration needs.

Software-defined data centres tend to be operated by cloud-giants like Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform, who invest millions of pounds into cybersecurity each year. With their budget and expertise, your business will reach levels of security that wouldn’t be possible to achieve alone. Cloud-based centres can also automatically backup your data, making them a lot more reliable than hardware that can be damaged.

5. Improve Customer Experience

With more and more organisations using high-speed, automated technologies, consumers have acquired a vastly increased sense of urgency and expectations. Refusal to modernise could, therefore, put your company at a severe competitive disadvantage. By incorporating SD-WANs and AI into your infrastructure, tasks can be completed automatically with accuracy, at intense speed. This will ultimately improve the rate at which your services are delivered – a necessary provision to fulfil the needs of today’s digitally empowered customer.

Here at Forfusion, we make digital modernisation simple. Whether it’s integrating your current data centre to a hybrid cloud solution, or completely transferring your data into a software-defined centre - we can help. We’ll use our expertise in software development and implementation to revolutionise your data centre into one that drives business growth and performance. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch now.