My company owns no IT assets

What would you think if a Senior Executive stated – “our goal is to own no IT assets by 2014”. ?

This is a goal of many companies . If not a stated goal , it is on the agenda for conversations.

Why?

1)  Working arrangements of DBAs are changing.  DBAs and IT professionals in general demand  flexibility . The hours are longer and 24 x 7 is the reality of most IT departments. To facilitate systems access and DBA support  , a solid infrastructure is required.  Working way from the office \ data centre is no problem, with secure VPN and cheap broadband.

Maintaining the infrastructure is expensive.

Outsourcing the infrastructure is cheaper for many companies.

2)   Virtualization has been the buzz-word for a long time. In the DBA world , adoption is slower, requiring serious testing before it’s implemented, especially for heavy-duty databases.  

Virtualization makes hardware a less strategic component. Of course , performance is seriously impacted by hardware and the IO sub storage. Virtualization is not a panacea, but has many benefits including Disaster Recovery.

If hardware becomes a less strategic component of the infrastructure , there is more scope for moving to different hardware environments. Scaled out databases  are more suitable to the  topology of multiple virtual servers mapped to separate LUNs.

 The impact of owning less IT assets

1)   IT is considered an expense item for most organisations.  Owning less IT assets means smaller budgets. Or reallocating budgets to other parts of IT such as business intelligence

2)   IT head-count to decrease. Outsourcing the infrastructure support means paying another organisation to manage the IT assets. They are usually fulfilling this task for multiple companies ,therefore can provide a service at a cheaper rate.

 Factors

1)      Compliance programmes exist within large organisations , particularly financial organisation.  

2)     Security. What is the nature of the data?  Are there regulatory restrictions on how data is managed?

 Many organisations already Outsourcing DBA tasks to an Offshore IT company . Database management is one area , where outsourcing can work. Especially if there is a clear breakdown of outsourced tasks. Outsourcing IT assets is the next step for organisaions.