The Forgotten Data Center Lease
It all started when the CIO was traveling back from a trip to Europe and picked up a copy of an industry magazine focused on IT. Over the next 7 plus hours in the air, he read all about the cloud and how it would make his company more agile, increase revenue, and lower IT expenses. The next day at the office, he called a meeting of his department heads and declared from that moment forward, IT was to proceed with a "cloud-first initiative" for all new IT projects and should plan migration strategies for all existing platforms deemed appropriate for the cloud. He would be the hero, the leader of this revolutionary new way of thinking at the company, and for that – and all the money the company would save – he would surely be revered.
His team would work for the next 3 years transforming his vision into reality. Server after server, rack after rack, and storage frame after storage frame shutdown in the corporate data centers as workload made its way to the nebulous cloud. While the project had its challenges, and compromises were made, it was moving forward to completion – albeit over budget and later than planned. About a month before the last decommissioning at the primary data center, where only about 20 equipment racks would remain, the question came up about when to tell their data center provider they would be moving out. The CIO contacted his company’s internal real estate department, the group responsible for the data center lease, joyously proclaiming that they were soon to be free of their data center captors and that they should alert the provider they would be moving out in 30 days.
If the above sounds like an IT fairy tale, it is not. It is a true story. Unfortunately, it was not a fairy tale ending at all; it far more resembled a nightmare. What the CIO failed to consider was that his data center lease had several years of contracted term remaining. Now, in addition to paying for its shiny new cloud infrastructure, the company would also being paying a six figure per month rent bill for the next four years for an empty data center. The heroic cost savings transformed into cost overruns, and the CIO was no longer revered, but instead found himself the scapegoat soon to be unemployed. There are many reasons this unfortunate turn of events unfolded: poor planning and communication; lack of interdepartmental teamwork; and a general lack of accountability to name a few.
One thing that could have helped prevent this unfortunate situation would have been a comprehensive current state assessment that included a snapshot of current IT demand and a forecast for the future (including any estimated or planned migrations to the cloud), a thorough review of all remaining contractual obligations, and a more complete understanding of ongoing IT-related operations and expenses. Creating an accurate assessment of these and other important factors requires expertise in a variety of areas that few companies have on their team. This is where companies should consider engaging a Hybrid Advisor to ensure the path taken does not lead to The Forgotten Data Center Lease or something worse.