Executive Brief: Data Center Evaluation Checklist
The decision to host your business-critical applications in a managed service provider data center can lower your costs and give your organization access to a secure, scalable, and highly available infrastructure. It can also free up internal IT staff to work on strategic projects, rather than application and systems monitoring and management.
Please note, this is an abbreviated version of the original executive brief. For the full version, please download the Executive Brief: Data Center Evaluation Checklist and Due Diligence (PDF).
Key Elements of a Data Center Operations Review
All data centers do not have equal capabilities. When you decide to outsource part or all of your IT landscape, you need to perform due diligence to ensure that data center capabilities meet accepted industry best practice – and your business needs.
While there is no official certification authority, how data centers are evaluated are often benchmarked against guidelines like those of the Uptime Institutes and ANSI/TIA standards, two of the commonly known entities that rank data centers according to their infrastructure and operational components. Although these standards are a great reference point, they are by no means an exhaustive guide, since technology advances sometimes outpace standards.
Data Center Evaluation Checklist
Physical Facilities
The first criteria for judging a data center is the location itself – the location should be in a region with a low incidence of natural disasters, with no history of flooding, seismic activity, hurricanes, and such. Locations should also be chosen to maximize security and access to services and utilities, while minimizing risks like vibration, crime, industrial pollution, high traffic, and fire.
Second is the structure of the building — the physical components of building construction and features like floor design need to be validated against accepted data center construction standards. The building’s systems — electrical, mechanical, fire suppression — also need to be assessed and validated. Finally, the facility must have redundancy built into all systems.
Operational Effectiveness
In addition to assessing the physical facilities of the data center,
the operations of the entity running the data center must be reviewed to ensure a high level of operational effectiveness and stability. The entity should have a proven track record of financial viability as well as an established customer base.
Further, their business practices need to be run in accordance with processes and procedures that are documented, disseminated, and regularly updated to reflect organizational as well as infrastructure changes.
Systems Management Effectiveness
Data center infrastructure components must be supported by system management policies and procedures that were designed and implemented to ensure optimal performance. For effective operations, the services that support the data center such as the problem incident reporting system and change management must be defined, documented and integrated into data center operations.
Disaster Recovery Planning
Data centers must have a thorough, well documented and tested disaster recovery plan to guarantee minimal downtime and to ensure that SLA times are met. Disaster recovery Plans are designed to recover the applications, data, and physical network within established critical timeframes and to minimize the impact of a disaster on the business. The data center’s Disaster recovery Plans should be assessed to ensure that they meet the requirements defined in SLAs and other performance timeframe requirements.
The preceding four checklists provided the high-level attributes that need to be assessed as part of data center due diligence. For more detail about the individual attributes, refer to the standards developed by the Disaster Recovery Institute or contact Secure-24 at 800-332-0076.
Secure-24 is a premier provider of managed IT operations, hosting and cloud services, providing highly available environments and expert management and support for your business critical applications.
