Data Centers: Building vs. Buying

The challenges of IT industry are deepening further everyday with ever-changing involvements in the technological horizons. This is one of the prime reasons data centers in India have to shuffle their arrangements endlessly for sustaining enough space, cooling and energy at the facility.

IT managers and CTOs are often faced with this question whether to build or to buy data centers. They need to consider many factors for deciding which makes more sense- investing in an in-house data center, colocation services, dedicated server or cloud solutions.

Here is the checklist that can help businesses compare the pros and cons of building a data center or that of buying the services from data center services providers.

Building data center vs. buying data center services:

1. Service launch time: Building an in house data center facility may take at least 2 years while you can start using services much earlier when you buy data center services.
   
2. Professional expertise: When you build your data center, it means you would need to hire many IT staffs to run and maintain the facility. This will certainly incur huge amount of costs. Whereas when you take up services of data center providers, professional expertise and quality services will come for free or at negligible prices.
   
3. Costs: Apart from cost of staffing and training, there will be a requirement of huge investment to build a data center. And, the cost of building a data center will be probably 1000 times more than using the services of data center providers.
   
4. Uptime: data center services providers have all the advanced technologies and redundant infrastructure which is why when compared to in-house data center, these are capable of delivering higher server uptime
   
5. Operational expenses: When you buy data center services, the operational expense is distributed over multiple clients and the burden of the cost on an individual client is much lesser. While this might not be the case for in-house data centers as the entire operational expenses have to be borne by the user.
   
6. Flexibility: If there is any need for any additional space and capacity, data center solutions providers can easily scale up the resources without any wastage of resources.
   
7. Environmental impact: There is already a severe scarcity of land on the planet earth. So building a data center for every business will not be a feasible idea. Moreover, it will lead to wastage of space, energy as well as efforts. Data Center services provider are driven to be energy efficient, space efficient as well as cost efficient.