Data Center is dead
There, I've said it. Well OK, maybe not really dead just yet, but it is on its death bed.
What is ultimately killing this concept, which originated all the way back in the 1940s, is the need for agility and ability for the business to adapt to change.
Forget about Survival of the fittest
Your amazing Data Center built for challenges of yesterday is more than useless when it comes to solving challenges of tomorrow. Worse: more than likely it's even holding you back ta adapt to tectonic changes which are reshaping the invisible socio-economic and business fabric on which the current business models stand.
A Data Center does not come on its own. It comes with a culture. It comes with the way things are run. With a certain mindset. And more usual than not, the mindset is authoritarian - it restricts or even prevents oasis of innovation to sprout and grow!
Leave it behind
What we need right now is to move past the 7 stages of grief - things are just not going to be the way they used to be. Sure, it was cool, it was fun, we've built great stuff, and we should be proud of it. Still, we need to accept that going forward it's just not going to cut it. It's ok to feel a bit sad or even angry, but we must not become the obstruction and stand in the way of transformation.
The culture needs to go first
Obviously a Data Center can't be shut off and replaced over night. It will take some time for it to decompose.
But your culture - the overall corporate / organisational IT culture needs to change. There are lots of people all over your organisation with good, innovative ideas worth trying out! These ideas are filtered out through personal and political agendas of organisational structures, and more likely than not only the most boring and conforming ones are ever permitted to surface.
Even if you have something like an idea board where everybody can vote for their favourite ideas, remember this:
Empower those who actually do
Who is more likely to really know how any random process in your company works and what are its bottlenecks or possible improvements: those who are watching them from a birds-eye view or those who actually run them on a daily basis?
Imagine an individual contributors who is frustrated with a certain obstacle in their daily process so much that they come up with numerous potential improvements. Your key question should be: how do I empower them? How do we give them a chance to solve the problem. Granted, many will fail. But some will survive. Through time, a large number of small improvements will make your business incredibly efficient.
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Expand your Data Center to the Cloud
The ideas and solutions will likely require services which simply don't exist in your Data Center: chatbots, AI services (text/image/voice classification and recognition), self service and/or big data analytics, high performance compute, developer and app platform services....
Actually, these will give a new face and a new life to your Data Center, which might delay its decomposition for a few more years!
Every Cloud vendor has capabilities to seamlessly connect to your Data Center. For a prototype, a simple VPN will do. For ideas which grow to mission critical systems, Cloud vendors usually provide better, more resilient and high performance options.
In the ideal world
Every computer-literate contributor should have the means to provision various cloud services and connect them to your Data Center dev/test environment, or even to (read-only) data in your prod environment.
Now if reading that made your heart skip a bit and your soul cry a loud and profound NOOOOOOOO..... I have news for you: you are likely a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. I bet you a pizza that in the next 5 years that will be common in many successful businesses, at least in some way.
I hear all the if and buts... "but if we give people access to data, they will steal them!!!". In the meantime, highly confidential data are circulating in spreadsheets and no one batts an eye... If anything, giving people the proper tools will make data access traceable, unlike spreadsheets!
I will not pretend that I have a solution for less IT skilled contributors, as they will also need developer/IT resources, which is an additional challenge. From personal experience, I will tell you that the biggest problem that geeks have is that we (sometimes) don't know what problems to solve. So bringing the two groups together is likely the key.
Another strategy would be to mass-enable Cloud skills to everyone willing to learn.
I still remember the huge enablement efforts back in the 90s when everybody had to learn how to use Word. We are talking about people who were using old-school typewriters for the most part of their long careers!
And guess what, they've managed! Some of them even really clicked with it and made custom macros and whatnot to make their work more efficient. Perhaps Cloud is the new Word in that regard?
Key takeaways
Share your thoughts
Crazy? Visionary? Whatever? Let me know what you think!
grammar: still -> steal