Question

Emerald Consulting LLC – Emerald Consulting has 5 massive data centers which has a high cost to the IT operations budget. The CTO of the company has mandated a 25% reduction in cost over the next year. As the director of IT, you are required to identify possible solutions to present to the executives showing options to reduces the cost associated with the data centers. Also, the company expects to expand globally which may create more stress on the IT budget.

Answer 1

Data centers are the group of buildings which contains computers, servers, storage systems and many more things which definately helps in the respective business. But, Maintainance of data centers comes with a huge cost. As Emerald Consulting LLC runs 5 massive datacenters which definately becomes a burden to IT operations budget of the company. Being a consulting firm, if they want to reduce the cost by 25% over the next year, they can in regular time intervals, should start transferring their IT infrastructure on the "Cloud Computing"

Cloud Computing is basically the on demand services provided by cloud providers on their IT infrastructre. In simple words, they are renting their services and will charge according to usage. One of the pioneer in the cloud computing technology is AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon which provides on demand cloud computing services to individuals, companies, etc, on pay as you go basis. They will only charge you for the services you use on monthy or hourly payments on the basis of your service usage. The process of deploying the datacenter on the cloud is known as data center virtualization.

AWS provides a wide range of services like storage, computing, security, database, developer tools, machine learning, internet of things, game tech, media services, networking & content delivery and many more. It was launched in 2006 and has seen as an rapid growth in the business. They have a global infrastructure and holds a market share of about 51% and offers more than 2500 services and features. They have huge data centers which are basically known as availability zones. You can use their tonnes of services as per your requirement. In terms of cost reduction, you're using their resources, their maintainence, their security, their power consumption, etc. So, it'll definatately reduce cost for your company.

But, the thing is Emerald Consultancy LLC are already running their datacenters so you can't move all of the infrastructure at once on the cloud. They can move their 3 datacenters to the cloud and make some changes to the existing datacenters to reduce the cost by some percentage. With the tranferring of 3 datacenters to the cloud, Emerald consultancy LLC saved a lot of money which they used to pay for electricity, power, cooling, internet services, land premises and manpower. Cooling and power consumption cost are the major cost which datacenters have to bear. For the remaining 2 datacents, Emerald Consultancy LLC can opt for cooling systems which will cool the datacenters with the help of the outside air instead of water. In coming years, Emerald consultancy LLC can seek to move 100% to the cloud which would save their cost of the remaining datacenters. This decision would prove to be beneficial for Emerald consultancy LLC in the long run.