First it was the mainframe that was put on the endangered list. Now it is the entire data centre that is threatened with extinction – or at least eviction from the corporate campus. Running a data centre was once a necessary component of running a fair-sized IT organisation. It was the keep at the centre of the IT manager’s castle. But the rise of more pragmatic thinking within business has increasingly seen the question asked ‘why are we running this thing’. Failure to find a compelling answer quickly leads to a discussion about outsourcing the data centre.

That decision is made somewhat easier by the proliferation of well-qualified data centre operators – many of whom offer security and service that the corporate data centre manager might only dream off.

A couple of weeks back now The Australian published three articles that I had written on the topic of data centres. The first was based around an interview with newly-appointed CEO of the data centre operator NextDC, Craig Scroggie, who talked about that company’s ambitious growth plans. You can read that one by clicking here. Another of the stories looked at the criteria that companies use when selecting a data centre operator (you can read that one here) while the third was a profile of the engineering company Downer Group and its decision to relocate its various data centres to Hewlett-Packard’s newly-opened Aurora data centre, west of Sydney (you can read that one here).

In each instance they show that the trend of data centre outsourcing is alive and well in Australia.