Leaders at any ambitious bank or credit union have a hard time seeing where an outsourced data center strategically fits with their business. It takes time and resources to dig deeper because the reward for digging is sometimes just a hole, and time is at a premium.
IT departments are often regarded as a tactical weapon that keeps the highly valuable basic core services running and is a high cost to the business. This is a forgivable impression because the team is expected to respond to emergencies, work on unexciting projects like data storage, hardware replacement schedules, and particularly since the pandemic, cost a lot of money every month.
HR departments are also finding it much more difficult to find qualified and affordable IT staff, particularly in more rural areas, thanks to the draw of the coasts and the myriad technology jobs there.
Bank CEOs would like to build a bench of young, imaginative techies that can build analytics tools and execute digital marketing campaigns that will attract more commercial lending projects and retail deposits that help make the bank money, but they find they must outsource those projects.
Looking at the same situation from the reverse angle, why would young, bright techies want to work for an employer that just has them working on menial break/fix tasks and tools that use languages from the 1990s?
If there is budgetary room for outsourcing those more glamorous projects, why not look at the situation from another perspective? Data closets and server hardware are a drain on resources. Cooling a server room is expensive and has multiple single points of failure. Hardware replacement schedules and multi-vendor management are time-consuming and unproductive.
The solution is to outsource hosting of the all-important core services infrastructure to a partner with a local, resilient, purpose-built data center and re-purpose the square feet of real estate in the office. In the same vein, why own the hardware? Run your software on outsourced hardware that is new, runs much faster than yours and is always available. Most of all, your IT team is now much happier at not having to fight for budget every three years and run the break/fix gauntlet of daily office life, plus they get to work on something that will develop their IT skills!
As a result, both physical and cyber security will improve, networks become more resilient, power is more reliable, and your branch and IT staff happier. New data storage alternatives become available, together with improved DR strategy options, and the outsource data center team becomes another, no-cost expert resource for your IT team.
In a world where it’s tough to grow and realize strategic ambitions, commercial data centers are built to give alternatives for mission-critical applications.
