September 20158pinionIn myOOAt the Water's Edge: De-risking Data Center OperationsInertia is a powerful force, but it has nothing on Mother Nature.A few years ago, a series of powerful storms demonstrated the potential impact of disruptions at CIT's office building in suburban Livingston, New Jersey. This office housed hundreds of employees, as well as the company's primary data center. The Livingston technology hub was critical to CIT's operations. When I joined the company in the aftermath of one of these episodes, it was evident that the response plan we had in place worked, but it wasn't state of the art and didn't address many of CIT's goals. There was an opportunity to strengthen our data center platform and develop a strategy to provide more reliable and cost-effective support to our partners in the business.The business case for making substantive and transformational changes to our IT infrastructure had received a jolt as a result of these storms. CIT, like many financial services companies, had seen its reliance on data infrastructure increase in recent years, owing to the digitalization of commerce and stricter requirements for protecting customer information. The legacy environment we had in place was still meeting our basic needs. At the same time, our IT team was already working at full capacity to manage their day-to-day responsibilities. Taking the time to develop and implement a business case for changing our data center strategy would be a significant commitment.The change in the data center strategy was a starting point for a larger discussion about enhancing our technology platform to support CIT's business objectives. In order to do this, we needed to reduce our cost base, have a more current architecture with better resiliency and be more nimble so we could easily meet emerging business demands without worrying about capacity or resource constraints.After careful planning, we embarked on a migration of our data centers. When this process is complete, CIT's data needs will be met by two co-located sites that are more than 250 miles apart and managed by two separate third-party providers. These providers will support our technology goals at a fraction of the cost that we would have spent had we kept our data infrastructure in-house. This solution also strengthens our defenses against all manner of disruptions.Throughout the migration process, five principles have dictated our data center strategy:1--Get Out of the Real Estate BusinessA big part of our business case for moving to a co-location model revolved around the costs we were absorbing by owning and managing our own data center. In addition to rent, data center ownership entailed managing the facility and facility-related investments, ensuring we had the staff to keep the servers up and running day and night, and maintaining physical security and controls. Data centers are huge fixed costs with a long tail; it's more effective to deploy your resources where they can better provide business value.Just as CIT didn't want to be in the real estate business, we also didn't want to be in the IT equipment integration business. The industry is offering inte-grated solutions (converged and hyper-converged solutions) that allow us to redeploy re-sources toward our automa-tion efforts. By Stacey Goodman, EVP & CIO, CIT [NYSE:CIT]Stacey Goodman
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