I was talking with a colleague the other day and he shared some interesting feedback he had received: that in order to be truly successful, your company needed to own and operate its own data center.
"Seriously? In this day and age?" I said.
He was as surprised as I was at the outdated and frankly, archaic, view that a company needed to own and operate its own data center – and that doing so was directly related to that company’s success. I’m sure wherever the opinion came from – be it originating with this person or trickling down from a board member – it had something to do with the idea that Facebook and Google own their own data centers. There have even been some tech journalists supporting that notion.
One has to remember, however, that both of these companies are bad examples. They are technology trendsetters in every definition of the word – that’s for sure – but they were also both started in an era where there wasn’t the easy and cost-effective availability of cloud services, storage and outsourced data centers.
Any company starting today would be a fool to not take advantage of these services – they are readily available, easy to take advantage of and adaptable to any company. Just look at Instagram and Netflix – both successful companies that had no interest in the traditional way of building a company.
And why would you? As a young company, or an old company for that matter, taking on the extra overhead costs of purchasing your own equipment and facilities, not to mention running and maintaining them, just does not make financial sense. You’d need to hire extra staff as well to be sure your core employees weren’t spending time managing the back end of your operation. In this day and age, every employee counts – and every one should be committed and focused on the larger company goal.
One of the most important advances in these services is the aforementioned adaptability – meaning that companies can be assured (if they choose the correct vendor) that these services will grow with them. Cloud and storage providers today are ready and able to be true partners to companies, providing them what they need even as the number of users, employees, customers and amount of data stored increases exponentially.
Here at Markley Group we’re dedicated to being that sort of partner – regardless of whether you’ve decided to let us store and manage your critical data and information in our world-class data center, or taking advantage of our cloud services.
Letting an expert handle it for you instead of spending the time and money to build your own system is what the true hallmark of success should be – not an outdated idea that you need to control your own data center to be successful.
