Many business owners have heard of a data centres but are unaware of their capabilities. Some people have been left behind in terms of business technology and this is costing their company. A data centre is a physical place that stores and manages date for a range of companies in an assortment of industries. It houses business critical applications and information on the cloud.
What is a Data Centre?
Data centres are centralised locations where service providers store, collect, process, and distribute large amount of data for a range of clients. They aren’t a new concept and they have existed in some form since the advent of the computer. Over time they have developed, and data center infrastructure has changed as technology continues to advance.
In the beginning, you may have had one supercomputer that looked after all the data. As data processing got bigger, equipment got smaller and cheaper, allowing the industry to network multiple servers at one time to increase computing power. A data service provider connects communication networks so that their clients have easy access to them, or the information on them. All this can be done remotely without needing to be in the data centre itself.
Why Do We Need Them?
We are data hungry at every level of business and the demand for processing power, storage, and information continues to grow. Many people think the idea of cloud computing means data isn’t stored on a computer but online. This isn’t accurate, data which is sent to the cloud is stored on hardware, that hardware is in a data centre. Although the data isn’t on your business hard drive or home computer, it is stored in another location, housed on physical drives elsewhere.
Any company that needs to generate or use data will benefit from a colocation data centre in some way. Here are just some businesses and industries that need data centres:
- Government Agencies
- Educational Bodies
- Telecommunications Companies
- Financial Institutions
Organisations benefit from data centres in a wide variety of ways, they protect against power failure, they allow companies to cut costs and they improve efficiency.
Data centres have been around for a long time and they continue to be critical for a wide variety of businesses. However, with the advancements in technology, the number of ways to deploy a data centre has undergone a radical shift. The future of data centres is healthy, but their operations will become increasingly dynamic.
