See the vXchnge Difference at Our National Colocation Data Centers
By: Kaylie Gyarmathy on November 17, 2020
Maximizing the return on investment (ROI) from every portion of the budget is a basic business tactic—so basic that there are countless articles on “how to maximize ROI.” Being able to get more from the same (or smaller) expenditures is an attractive prospect for virtually any business.
One key area that’s ripe for ROI improvement in most modern organizations is in their IT infrastructure. IT can be a major expense, but it is a crucial part of modern business operations. Monitoring your organization’s IT infrastructure can help you identify ways to improve ROI for IT spend while keeping on top of details like your company’s bandwidth requirements, data storage needs, and more.
What is infrastructure monitoring? Why should you have a team for monitoring IT infrastructure? Who should be on this team?
Quick Links
IT infrastructure monitoring is the practice of collecting and analyzing data from the company’s IT assets (data centers, servers, networks, hardware, software, etc.), policies, and processes to create greater IT visibility.
Organizations use infrastructure monitoring to collect data that they can then use to optimize their resources, processes, and policies to improve business results and their ROI from IT spend.
This often goes beyond simple data center monitoring. Intelligent monitoring tools are commonly used to deliver a “360 degree” view of an organization’s IT infrastructure—leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the network and powerful analytical tools to monitor network performance and health in real time.
Why should your own organization have a dedicated infrastructure monitoring team (either internal or external)? There are several reasons, such as:
Here’s a hypothetical example of two businesses:
Company A has invested in data center tools to provide intelligent monitoring and has a team of individuals parsing that data to identify issues, project the expected growth of demand for IT resources, and more.
Company B has not made any investment into their IT infrastructure to set up monitoring. Instead, they follow the “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” motto for minimizing expenses.
Both businesses are operating in the same industry and are of similar sizes. However, after a few months, Company A’s infrastructure monitoring team notices that their data center is needing a lot more bandwidth than they initially expected. While it isn’t at full capacity yet, the current rate of growth will bring it there soon.
So, they add a colocation data center and traffic routing tools to spread the load out—possibly creating a perimeter data center that’s more closely located to where traffic and requests are coming from. Because of this, they’re able to avoid a major bandwidth bottleneck and keep their business operations running smoothly.
Company B also runs into the same bandwidth problem as Company A. However, they did not anticipate the issue, so their data center runs into a critical failure one day as it gets overloaded with requests. This leads to extensive system downtime that results in:
Because of Company A’s investment in infrastructure monitoring, they are able to anticipate the disruption and avoid service interruptions while Company B starts losing customers after their data center goes down for a couple of days. Disgruntled Company B customers then make the switch to Company A, further helping them outpace and outgrow their competitor.
So, who should you have on your infrastructure monitoring team? Preferably, it should be someone who:
Need help with intelligent infrastructure monitoring? vXchnge is here to help! With our intelligent monitoring tools, keeping track of your monitoring will be easier than ever.
From the very start, vXchnge has been dedicated to providing a “best in class” colocation data center experience. Our award-winning in\site platform is a standard feature of our colocation service that allows customers to manage their data center environment as easily as they would a data center that they had on-site.
With the in\site Mobile app, you can keep track of power utilization and bandwidth consumption in real time—helping you identify when power and bandwidth requirements are getting close to exceeding your data center’s capabilities. You can also easily manage and submit tickets with our 24/7/365 support center, remotely control data center access, and set up notifications for your collocated data center.
Experience the difference for yourself by signing up for a free demo of in/site now!
As the Marketing Manager for vXchnge, Kaylie handles the coordination and logistics of tradeshows and events. She is responsible for social media marketing and brand promotion through various outlets. She enjoys developing new ways and events to capture the attention of the vXchnge audience.
Use this checklist to help protect your investment, mitigate potential risk and minimize downtime during your data center migration.