Tips for planning a move to colocation

Over the last decade, businesses all over the world have begun moving their IT workloads out of in-house server room and to data center or the cloud. Recent polls have shown that more than 70% of organizations with their down server rooms and data centers will look at winging down in-house systems in the next three years, and the trends shows no signs of slowing down. However, the process can be more complex than people would imagine. Here are some tips from Rack Alley:

Perform a hardware audit

When you complete an internal audit of all your hardware assets, you will have a better idea of what sort of capacity you will require, and how much that will cost. On the other hand, you will also get a good sense of how much you can save be getting rid of overlaps in your systems. You want to keep the amount of equipment you move to the LA data center as minimal as possible.

Perform a systems audit

Do you really need all your existing systems? Often, when an organization upgrades on system, it tends to keep the older one and never gets rid of it long after the upgrade. Everyone has systems like this and a systems audit will show you what you need and don’t need.

Once you have the above information, you can work out your priorities and then start communicating the plan to everyone involved in the migration. Ultimately, the more information you have, the easier it will be to plan the move and execute it.