The End of the Server Room

If you were about to build a new business in 2018, what would your first step be? Run to Dell or HP and buy a bunch of servers and a rack, plug them all in, and open the doors? I think not.

The entrepreneur’s singular focus is on the new business. Not its support framework.

The problem is that we, who have been in business for any length of time, have become a slave to the past. The effort and dollars invested in the servers we’ve bought to support our actual business is astronomical. And we now have a choice.

Here’s the evolution. We buy servers. We put data on them. We need to protect the data so we buy: firewalls, IPS/IDS devices, layers of malware protection, USB controls, encryption management, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, patching… The list goes on and on.

That isn’t enough.

We need cluster our servers, back them up, and make their backups as close to instantly available as possible. Then, of course, test regularly to protect our investment.

Then every 3–5 years, we have to take another break from our business. Time to decide which replacements and upgrades we need to handle our current work.

Next step. Become a fortune teller. Predict anything that may happen next 3–5 years to avoid under-powering. But careful. Don’t waste money by buying more computing power than you will need.

Stop.

The public cloud has arrived. That is where your competitors are. That is where you need to be. Move the old infrastructure to AWS or Azure. You are locking in only one thing — flexibility. Flexibility to scale up or down as need. Flexibility to experiment. Flexibility to be wrong and fix it at any time.

The environment there is robust. Robust is an understatement. Multiple power companies feed a datacenter. Gigabits of resilient bandwidth connect it. Physical security is like Fort Knox. Don’t show up without being cleared for an appointment. You won’t get in.

The windows servers that run in your server room will run in the cloud. Period. They will be aggressively logged and they will run on continuously upgraded hardware. You will pay when you use them. Your bill when you aren’t using them? Zero.

The cost of moving existing servers to the cloud is about the same as replacing them in one hardware cycle. After that capital costs become rent. Not open on Sunday? Turn it off. Try breaching hardware that doesn’t exist when powered down. Can’t happen.

No entrepreneur would buy all the overhead that you already have. The nimble business of 2018 pushes the mass of their needs to cloud service providers. Their remaining apps move to the public cloud where distraction fades while focus on the business blossoms.

Be bold. Purge and embrace the cloud. Now get back to business.