[Overview] 4 Data Center Scenarios that Can Kill Your Bottom Line

Do more with less – that’s been the common theme in the data center and IT departments around the world. Data growth continues to skyrocket, leaving operations teams scrambling to manage more with fewer resources. Finding cost-effective ways to create efficiencies at scale is a critical step in addressing these issues. Read the following four scenarios for tips on how you can streamline existing processes and make your data center more efficient.

Scenario #1: “We spend all our resources on keeping our data center(s) up and running—there’s no time to focus on driving value for the business.”

The answer to using fewer resources is to manage less data. To do this, you must determine the data you have, then remove what you no longer need. This could include ROT (redundant, obsolete or trivial) information, data that’s past its retention date or information that isn’t critical to your business. This removal should include sanitizing data through cryptographic erasure, software-based overwriting of your data and/or physical destruction of your retired severs and other IT assets.

Software-based data erasure allows you to retain residual value for leased drives and data center equipment, or to reuse the disks and equipment you already own. It also allows you to eliminate manual processes with the ability to automate data erasures processes and erase hundreds of servers or drives simultaneously.

If you operate (or help operate) a data center that’s currently providing co-location services or public cloud services, adding data erasure to your product/service offerings can help you mitigate some of your management costs and achieve added revenue.

Scenario #2: “We have piles of unused servers and drives taking up space.”

Large data centers have thousands of physical servers and data storage drives for total storage capacities calculated in petabytes.

In data centers, storage drives are purchased and deployed to store data for a certain length of time, then retired. Whenever these drives reach end-of-life. they must be securely and permanently erased before they are reused or resold. Erasing helps organizations achieve residual value for their drives, while physical destruction destroys the drives forever so that they can never be reused. Blancco Drive Eraser software boots on servers and storage systems, as well as in a mode that allows generation of reports for each individual drive.

Scenario #3: “It takes days to decommission our servers.”

According to Linux Labs: “The Total Cost of Ownership of a rack in a data center is approximately $120K over the data center lifetime… half of this is operating expense.” That’s a lot of excess money spent if the servers in the rack are no longer in use or need to be replaced.

Once you’ve decided to decommission servers that are outdated or no longer in use, you must determine the best way to go about this process. Traditional rack server decommissioning can take days or weeks. But there is a better way. At a large data center in California, Blancco erased:

• 4,000 servers (Dell) overnight
• Each server had 6x1TB SATA HDD
• A total of 5117 drives
• 5117TB of data

The project achieved NIST 800-88 compliance with 100 percent erasure verification. The total time from start (boot up) to finish (report collection) was 10 hours, and the erasures were done simultaneously, remote controlled through one Blancco Management Console.* How is this possible? With Blancco Data Center solutions, employees don’t have to erase servers one at a time; instead, servers can be erased simultaneously and only requires one person to perform the process. This results in huge savings in manpower and data management.

Scenario #4- “We have so much data, there’s no way we can protect it all.”

Data is growing exponentially. If your organization doesn’t have proper retention policies and data sanitization policies in place, you’re putting your data at risk. By implementing these policies, you’ll know what data you have and when to dispose of it. This helps you reduce your attack surface, lessening the impact of data breaches when they occur and giving you much less data to manage on a data basis.

_{* The erasure time per server was 5 to 8 hours, and the erasure method was NIST 800-88 Clear.}

You may be interested in:

How to Plan and Execute End-of-Life Hardware Decommissioning

What a Factory Reset Does—and What It Doesn’t Remove

The Basics of Managing IT Assets Across Their Lifecycle

[VIDEO] Wiping devices for IT offboarding? Start here