Hiring the data centre services is quite common a practice with most of the businesses of the present time, and there are significant reasons for this. Right from the small and medium scale organizations to the large enterprises, every single business needs a reliable source of data storage and that’s where a state of the art data centre seems to be the best solution. Keeping the huge popularity of data centres in mind, there are many organizations that are offering hosting services to a wide range of clients. But then, not all of them are equally efficient. Running a data centre is undoubtedly a difficult task as there are thousands of factors to be taken care of.
Apart from maintaining the infrastructure redundancy within a data centre, the owner has to take care of factors like maintaining the consistency of operation procedures and supporting the critical infrastructure systems. These are some basic components with the help of which continuous uptime can be ensured. It’s quite a well-established fact that in spite of having the best equipment and designs, systems often fail to perform up to the expectation. Although the immediate outrage is often prevented due to redundancy, it’s crucial to be able to get the help of experienced professionals and other important components in order to prevent a wide scale outage.
Studies show that most of the data centre hosting services benefits outages occur due to human error that has taken place during the routine maintenance of the systems or some other operations. Often, these errors are also caused by professionals who are not properly trained or qualified, and hence, don’t know how to handle an overload condition or how to deal with an equipment failure. Most of the times, they fail to respond in a timely manner and rectify the problem. If you are involved with the process of running a data centre, you should have a clear knowledge of how to run a data centre infrastructure without any sort of disturbance. And you will be able to ensure that only when you know what your customers expect from you. Therefore, here is a list of the services that a data centre is supposed to offer to its target customers. Take a quick look and make it a point to ensure the same for your existing and potential customers.
What are the data centre hosting services usually offered?
- Physical site inspection – As a responsible data centre owner, it’s the responsibility of the professionals to inspect the site physically, at frequent intervals. This helps ensure all the operations are executed with perfection, without creating any trouble to the clients.
- Annual preventive maintenance schedule – This is one of the most important responsibilities of a web hosting service provider. As a data centre owner, they should plan a maintenance schedule at regular intervals. In this schedule, the professionals will be responsible for checking the exact requirements of their clients so that they can easily cater to those.
- Resolution of service issues – While running a data centre, it’s quite obvious to face certain service issues. It’s the duty of the data centre owner to resolve these issues in due time so that the clients have to face zero or least possible downtime.
These are some of the most important services that a state of the art data centre should offer. If you are planning to run a data centre, be sure to consider all these aspects well in advance.
Why your customers should select you?
Running a data centre would turn out to be successful only if you can turn your potential customers into existing ones and if you can make more and more businesses approach you for the services that you offer. Well, how can you do that? While looking for a data centre provider, users look for certain factors. Make sure you are ensuring all that they are looking for –
- Be flexible – With the growing business, every organization needs a flexible storage option so that they can store the data without any hassle. Make sure you will be able to provide your customers with what they need now as well as what they might need in the coming years. If you can assure them that you will be able to pace up with their growing requirements and they won’t require to look for additional sources for keeping data safe, most likely they will sign the deal with you.
- Assure security – While keeping the valuable business data with a data centre, customers look for the best possible security. If you can ensure that you are going to keep the data safe with different security measures like RAM based security, password encryption, user codes etc., your customers will be able to rely you easily. Make sure you convey the security policies that are followed at your data centre clearly to the customers. Be transparent enough and let them know what layer of security you are going to offer. Once they have a clear knowledge of all the intricate details, they will find it easy to trust you.
- Ensure responsive customer service – Remember that this is one of the major factors that businesses look for while shortlisting data centre hosting service providers. If you are already maintaining a dedicated customer service team, be sure to let the customers know about it right at the beginning. This will act as a motivational factor for them even before they start looking for the other components. Assure your customers of the fact that whenever they face a problem, a group of trained and experienced professionals will be there to troubleshoot the problem, 24X7, 365 days a year.
Apart from these factors you should also set up your data centre at a convenient location since location plays a key role in the selection process. For instance, if your data centre is established at a location that is prone to natural disaster like earthquakes, there are high chances of potential customers rejecting you even before approaching you.