Over the last decade, two very different innovations have changed the makeup of the data centre. The first being public cloud services, as organizations have added these resources to their data centre. The second is the need for additional services at the network edge, outside of the traditional data centre, to support real-time activities where latency back to the traditional data centre is prohibitive. The modern data centre spans not only the traditional data room or colocation, but also the edge and public cloud.

Controlling environmental services in the data centre is often overlooked by IT operations teams. With significant technology innovations, IT teams should be expecting more from their partners supplying power and cooling in the data centre and at the edge. Tools are available to help provide real-time visibility, management and alerting that can empower IT teams to plan and react more effectively to maintain IT services. As an example, fully enclosed computer racks can allow for equipment to be protected while being placed as needed at the edge of the network or in environments where a full computer room would be cost-prohibitive.

Providing scalable data protection solutions that are flexible enough to protect data, regardless of where it is located, is critical. Changes in the way data is backed up – according to policies rather than schedules – can save operations teams a significant amount of time. Modern backup solutions also allow for search features to help find personal identifiable information being stored in locations it should not be. As organizations evaluate new backup and data management solutions it is also important that they look for integrated ransomware protection. Many backup and storage platforms have built in capabilities to mitigate the impact of ransomware.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) can not only streamline your day-to-day operations by bringing compute, storage and virtualization into a single cohesive management layer, but it can radically improve your team’s efficiency when provisioning new services or performing routine maintenance. HCI solutions come loaded with amazing features that in a traditional environment would either not be possible or would require a significant investment. In addition to the flexibility HCI can bring, high availability is one of the biggest benefits built into the solution. HCI is designed to suffer outages without having any impact on your production environment.