Part 1 of 3: What are The Challenges Facing Enterprise Data Center Leaders Today? Why are trusted advisors more important than ever?
The enterprise and mid-market businesses headquartered in North America are increasingly global and more regionally dispersed than ever before. This global and regional geographic coverage has also dispersed employees, customers, vendors, distribution partners, and supply chain partners. This leaves the Data Center Leaders and influencers in these organizations trying to figure out how to smoothly deliver mission-critical applications through the cloud, available network functions, mobile, and other evolving technologies.
The decision makers for data center business and technology recovery and protections strategies are also operating in a complicated landscape in their own organizations often serving multiple stakeholders and executive leaders. While these decision makers used to be accountable to a CIO, they now have accountability to the CEO, Board, CIO, CFO, and CSO to name a few. In addition, the actual decision maker in the data center has shifted from historically ‘IT only’ to a number of other cross organizational stakeholders. So the Data Center leader may be in a business unit or could be “Leaders” – and a team of individuals across the leadership organization.
- This complexity makes it expensive and harder for enterprises to not only serve heavily concentrated communities of end users but also to accelerate the delivery of data and applications as the application layer has or is also moving fast to the cloud.
- Enterprises are also seeking solutions for compute, storage, network, security, mobile, & other evolving technologies and these same enterprises are under constant pressure to keep up with new technology, improve performance, and control costs.
- Great vendor solutions available for each, but each is a product offering not a complete solution and this leaves the Data Center leader and end user searching for:
- How to implement a cloud/multi cloud strategy?
- How to optimize their current network traffic and architecture to be cloud ready on-demand?
- How to scale their business and meet expansion needs?
- How to comply with audit and data sovereignty requirements?
- How to find a trusted partner who can deliver a complete solution?
For all the reasons above, the Data Center Leader must continue to focus on costs balanced with security; so the journey to the cloud is more important than ever and yet equally as challenging.
It’s because of all of these challenges, that Data Center Leaders need more than ever a core set of focused trusted advisors. These advisors need to represent different skills, company & industry relationships, and expertise; and they need to help bridge the leaders into the enterprise organization stakeholders. They must help solve the solution not perilous point product challenge for these data center leaders; and they need to be proactive and innovative!
This is also a tremendous opportunity for MSPS, CSPs, Hosting Companies, on-demand network service providers and other Digital and Cloud service providers who desire to earn the customers trust. It’s important for Data Center leaders to be clear on the types of advisors who would serve them well; and potentially explore relationships with sophisticated and mature cloud savvy partners who can help them decide which IT, network, and cloud services to use and how to deploy them quickly. With this rapidly changing IT, Cloud, and Enterprise landscape; now more than ever Data Center Leaders and partners can come together; and these system integrators, solution partners, and managed service providers in partnership with other technology and cloud providers can help the Data Center Leader realize their cloud vision.
In part II of this series, we will explore what services and assistance Data Center Leaders can find in trusted advisors. And in Part III, we’ll offer partnering advice from Data Center Leaders to the partners attempting to serve them.
