EXPERT RESPONSE
Data center budget: It sounds like your company is a candidate for a This Old Datacenter
makeover. Seriously though, your description offers a great example of what
can happen when a company stops thinking about its datacenter strategically
and lets its IT infrastructure and support solutions grow into an
increasingly complex, difficult to manage, and even dangerous hodgepodge.
The issues you raise are of critical concern, but the information accounting
is asking you to provide suggests that management may (a) be in a state of
denial about the situation or (b) resist addressing the problem (let alone
admitting one exists) until a major problem occurs. Unfortunately, that
head-in-the-sand attitude is all too common, even considering how
potentially disastrous a fire or other serious event could be for the
company and its clientele.
It sounds like your company needs to give serious consideration to assessing
its current IT requirements and comparing/contrasting what it needs against
what it already has. At this point, determining how new IT investments will
pay off with increased performance and efficiencies is likely to resonate
better with accounting and management than even well-founded fears about
over-heated servers and aging or dangerous infrastructure elements.
Most vendors offer assessment services, as do many datacenter consultants.
I'd start by querying your current hardware vendors about their offerings,
and also check in with competitors. It might also be worth finding out how
long it has been since your company's insurance inspected the datacenter.
The possibility of premium increases or a refusal of coverage might be just
the thing to get your datacenter makeover rolling.
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