By Business & Finance 
By Dara Brady, business account manager, Viatel
Throughout 2015 and 2016 Ireland has experienced exceptional growth in data centre rollout and demand for data centre space and services.
As companies’ IT strategies evolve, we are seeing a trend where companies are moving away from traditional local self-hosting and migrating towards a more hybrid approach. The hybrid model leaves some applications locally hosted and others hosted in a data centre or the cloud.
The benefits of hosting your critical applications and data in data centres are obvious for many businesses including accountants, law firms, call centres, manufacturing plants etc., who cannot manage and host data on a 24/7 basis on their premises.
Most businesses don’t have a highly skilled team of technicians available onsite 24/7 365 days of the year to reboot or replace a server if it fails at 3am. Neither do they have local power provided by a dedicated ESB substation with multiple layers of backup power, 24/7 onsite security and guaranteed around the clock cooling because their core business does not require it.
Most businesses have decided to push critical hardware and applications out to the data centres to avoid having to invest in turning local offices into 100% uptime facilities.
CONNECTIVITY
Ireland is lucky to have perfect conditions, infrastructure and policies that place us as market leaders in the data centre space. Businesses in Ireland have the choice of state-of-the-art facilities on their doorsteps with multi-million euro developments such as Viatel and Dataplex. These data centres are at the forefront of providing high tier colocation services to large corporate, enterprise and government clients on a local and international level.
These high-spec data centres can give your business the ability to outsource your technology needs to a facility that provides highly skilled technicians who are available around the clock to look after your equipment.
Most businesses have decided to push critical hardware and applications out to the data centres to avoid having to invest in turning local offices into 100% uptime facilities
Low latency connectivity between Ireland, the UK, mainland Europe and the United States, ensures applications perform in the real-time manner, which your business and clients expect it to. Round the clock security and monitoring ensures that only the people you authorise to access your kit can visit the facility.
If your business decides to move office or suffers a power outage or has connectivity issues with its supplier – your data centre provider will always have you covered from an uptime perspective.
SUPPORT AND SOLUTIONS
Dara Brady, Viatel
All data centres go through rigorous and robust certification processes to guarantee that they will remain online and operational in the event of some kind of outage. Your data will be safe, and the data centre provider’s service level agreement will outline all the back-up contingencies in place to ensure that there is never an interruption in service. Your only concern will be, which facility is the right fit for you?
Deciding which facility is the best for your business really depends on your own requirements. Different providers cater for all kinds of needs, from single rack space all the way up to dedicated private suites and halls. As the market in Ireland is quite competitive at the moment, it’s definitely worth your while shopping around to negotiate the best deal available for your organisation.
All data centres go through rigorous and robust certification processes to guarantee that they will remain online and operational in the event of some kind of outage
But watch out for hidden costs! Make sure you clarify that your operational expenditure won’t be laboured with incremental power or connectivity costs. Negotiate these with your data centre solutions expert from the outset to make sure your commercial experience is a smooth one, and all you have to think about is the improvements you can make to your organisation’s IT performance.
Speaking to Silicon Republic in February 2016, Ronan Harris, head of Google in Ireland, hailed Ireland as the “data centre capital of Europe”. With our highly educated and skilled IT professionals, excellent connectivity and proven track record for delivering secure and reliable services – it’s very difficult to refute this claim.
It’s an exciting time to be in the data centre sector in Ireland. Companies such as Apple have invested €1.7bn in a facility in Galway and Facebook has started building their Co. Meath data centre.
These data centres will service billions of customers on a global scale. Ireland is very comfortable with the ‘data centre capital of Europe’ title and some would argue ‘data centre capital of the world’.
About the blogger
Dara Brady is a business account manager at Viatel, the network and data-centre solutions provider to public and enterprise sector companies in Ireland.
As a business account manager, Dara is dedicated to providing clients with a solution that satisfies a company’s needs.
Dara has over 10 years of experience in sales and account management in the telecommunications and construction industries.
