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By Gordon Thomson, country manager, Scotland/Ireland, Cisco UK&I.
Advances in technology have fuelled the rising tide of outsourcing and offshoring that has seen businesses such as contact centres flood into Scotland and increasingly, to low-cost countries.
The contact centre industry has been a big economic success for Scotland but with low-cost countries nibbling away at it, what’s the next wave, the next industry which Scotland and Ireland can harness for economic benefit?
I believe the answer lies in data. We’re creating mountains of it – from emails, documents, spreadsheets, music, video files, and so on – driven by the growth of broadband, computer ownership, consumer devices and business software use. This data has to be stored and protected somewhere, and for larger businesses, this typically means in one or more data centres.
As the data needed to be stored continues to mount, the capacity and number of data centres needed to store it all is having to grow too… and at the rate that we continue to generate and use information, a lot more centres will be needed in the next decade.
With advances in technology allowing data to be stored and accessed from any location, and increasingly sophisticated internet-based business applications and processes, there’s no reason why these data centres for global businesses can’t be based in Scotland or Ireland. In fact, there are seven good reasons why I believe they can:
Minimal risk exposure
Businesses don’t want to put their important information in a risky area. What’s risky? Areas prone to natural disaster or likely regions for a terrorist threat are obviously best avoided. Locating the data centre in a geologically, climactically and politically stable environment is important.
Reliable, well-priced, robust power infrastructure
Data centres use a lot of electricity throughout the year, twenty-four hours a day to keep server, storage and networking hardware up and running. So reasonably priced and reliable power is a definite must.
Keep it cool
With all the power going in, data centres tend to run hot with all the technology in there. Extensive cooling is required to keep the temperature at an optimum level. Identifying a cooler location reduces the ambient temperature and cooling requirements, which cuts maintenance overheads and minimises the risk of a heat-induced component failure. Scotland, for example, has an average ambient temperature two degrees cooler than England – which will have a significant impact on the cooling costs of a data centre.
Telecoms infrastructure
Data centres tend to be situated far away from an organisation’s primary hub of business and have secondary, redundant locations (providing high availability, just in case the worst happens and disaster strikes). Communications between offices and the data centres occur via secure, high speed communications links. As such, businesses need to ensure that their data centres have access to fast, reliable, next-generation telecoms infrastructure.
A good local skills base
Running a data centre requires a high level of technological expertise. It takes good knowledge to set up and maintain the hardware and applications in place, which means a large pool of skilled workers, and preferably one with a low rate of staff churn, is needed to keep data centres up and running.
Space to expand
As mentioned earlier, data storage requirements are growing rapidly and while storage technology is doing its best to keep pace, businesses must plan for expansion. More and more data is also being stored digitally for regulatory reasons. Having room to expand if needed makes a lot of sense.
The ongoing costs in different locations
Maintenance fees for data centres can be very high – between high power requirements, the need for skilled staff, new hardware and implementation costs and so on, some countries will prove more economically viable than others. But hopefully as I’ve just demonstrated, cost alone isn’t the prime determining factor for locating a data centre.
Scotland and Ireland tick the box on all of these criteria – making them ideal locations for companies looking to establish new data centres.
This is why I believe it is important that we begin a discussion among government and business leaders on how we can make both Scotland and Ireland the most attractive places to secure further data centre investment, and the economic benefits that will follow.
The conditions are right and the data wave is upon us – the question is, can Scotland and Ireland catch it?
•Date: 12th July 2007• Region: UK/W.Europe •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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