Five Key Impacts of COVID-19 on IT Infrastructure

As Corporate Data Centers quickly become dinosaurs (1.2 million are expected to close by 2021 (Computerworld), COVID-19 is helping businesses codify and clarify their digital transformation strategies. With the increased popularity of both Third-Party and Hyperscale offerings, the pandemic is shedding more light on their respective advantages and limitations.

Third-party facilities offer outsourced facility infrastructure management while keeping capital-intensive IT models in place. Hyperscale’s consumption-based model requires limited capital investment but, when compared to legacy in-house managed IT infrastructure, tends to fall short on uptime and support (our sizable customers often complain aloud about cloud downtime and the inability to get live support even with millions in annual spend.)

But these high-level explanations don’t suffice in the face of a pandemic and work-from-home limitations. It requires a much deeper dive to understand the more tactical reasons to choose one over the other. And to get there requires a more intense review - and COVID has provided an interesting opportunity to do just this. In recent conversations with customers, partners, key IT stakeholders and business leaders, five key patterns have emerged:

1. Remote Colocation Can Be A Problem: Until recently, many IT shops have opted to colocate company-owned hardware in third-party facilities hundreds of miles distant from their IT teams. Even regional travel is problematic during a pandemic, which may lead to preference for local colocation or cloud offerings over remote colocation.

2. Disaster Recovery = Expensive Cloud: With stay-at-home orders keeping IT staff from traveling even moderate distances, housing physical infrastructure in another state limits in-house support options…to the point of “declaring” to ensure IT operations persist unabated. This is not only hugely expensive but also potentially dangerous as extracting from Disaster Recovery is not a simple endeavor.

3. “Cloud” Appeal Is On The Rise: Though “cloud” comes with a host of limitations, it does guarantee hardware uptime that is not reliant on your in-house staff (however limited that “uptime” may be). In the last month, we have heard many CIOs express their delight in having moved into the cloud (public or private) thereby avoiding hardware support concerns expressed above. This will invariably drive more customers to eschew gear purchases in lieu of leasing gear and outsourcing its management.

4. Corporate Data Centers Are Not Considered Essential: As if to underscore how little some companies view the strategic value of IT, during the pandemic’s early days, some IT staff were locked out of their own on-campus data center facilities as they were not deemed “essential.” If the company views its own data centers as superfluous, the expense incurred to maintain and support those facilities must put a huge target on their backs. 

5. A Pause In Long-Term Planning: Across the industry, my colleagues are seeing continued execution of projects that are already underway but delays to strategic initiatives concerning digital transformation. Uncertainty has IT shops re-evaluating everything and clamoring for budget to plug the holes left by unexpected work-from-home investments.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses assumed that IT staff had unfettered access to travel and facilities to support their data center investments. That is clearly not the case during a pandemic and has potentially re-written the rulebook regarding where and how to host applications in the future. And with these new rules come unexpected costs, which will drive IT departments to find creative funding solutions.

About The Author 

Michael Orell is the founder & President of Figure8 Onsite LLC, a company focused on securely retiring IT assets to help fund IT initiatives. A 25-year veteran of the IT infrastructure industry, Michael served in executive roles across data center, network and hardware companies to provide solutions to enterprises.