Think of everything your data center does for your business, such as storing all your vital data and keeping it organized so you can access the information you need to make decisions. Accelerating data growth has placed data centers under stress. Statista predicted that data center capacity will reach 2,300 exobytes by 2021.
Here are 4 ways you can strengthen the resiliency of your data center:
1) Support from a high-speed network
The network has always been an essential part of the data center infrastructure because it connects all data resources. Data needs to be accessible across a business. Information also needs to be transmitted quickly and securely.
Today, low-latency networks are more important than ever. Companies rely on real-time data to work more efficiently and please customers. Sluggish or underperforming applications can create significant hardship on users and customers. For a robust infrastructure to support those applications, the data center needs to be supported by a network provider that has outstanding peering, low latency, minimal packet loss and the lowest jitter possible. A fiber optic provider is a good start, but the quality of the network and the way it’s managed make the biggest difference.
2) Ensure compliance
Meeting compliance regulations is necessary to protect the privacy of customer data. Companies with data centers that fail to comply face stiff fines. Data centers should meet SOC 2, Type II compliance, but often companies in the health care and finance industries also face audits under HIPAA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Moving your data center into a colocation facility or to a cloud-provider with the proper compliance and audits can help ease the burden on your IT staff.
3) Enhance Physical Security
Insider threats or the physical destruction / theft of data is often an overlooked aspect of security. Social engineering and other penetration tests reveal that data can be easily access by rogue employees or malicious outsiders.
So while you’re rightly concerned with cyber-security threats, don’t forget to keep an eye on physical security. A colocation facility that has 24×7 monitoring, biometric access controls and other security measures will often far exceed what you can do in your own building or server room.
4) Leverage the Cloud for Disaster Recovery
If you can’t imagine moving your infrastructure to another data center or even the cloud, consider leveraging a hybrid approach. This “best of both worlds” scenario allows you to maintain control of your production workloads while benefiting from easy-to-use cloud solutions like Disaster Recovery as a Service. Replicating your applications to a secure cloud and having the ability to recover data in minutes without only seconds of data loss could mean the difference between a prolonged outage that changes your career path or a major disaster averted.
With DRaaS, you get affordable disaster recovery that performs when you need it most, especially if combined with a provider that can also include a low-latency network connection for end-to-end quality.
Improve Your Data Center’s Uptime
FirstLight provides a one-stop shop for everything you need to make your data center better. We can improve the quality of your network connecting, provide ample colocation space for single rack or custom suites, and have cloud solutions like Backup & Recovery as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service.
Contact FirstLight for all your data center and connectivity needs.
