CompUSA and Computer City remember them? Two big box computer superstore retailers that competed head to head back in the 90's they were power houses.
They competed so vigorously they often we located near each other, competitively
"shopped" each other, trying to out do each other with sales. Both went out of business, and frankly their clients rarely got the best our industry could offer. Just a marginally lower cost or a marginally better feature than the other guys.
I worked at one such store while I had friends who worked at the other. The competitive philosophy was similar at both, "we don't need to be the best, just slightly better than the other guys".
And this is exactly why their clients while thinking they were getting "a good deal" really were getting the lowest common denominator not the best deal or the best services.
In our industry like many, there is a notion of certification, that helps to establish credentials to some known level. Intended to be a good way of assuring that a person, product or service meets an established criteria or level of quality.
While these certification can serve as some basic form of datum point we need to be very mindful how much of our own intellectual integrity we abdicate to these certifications. Otherwise we can very easily find ourselves making decisions based on beliefs that certification establishes the level of quality or qualities, when in fact in most cases if not all merely establish the floor of minimal qualities.
Standards are best when they define how two pieces fit or function together, when it comes to services being provided, so called standards or best practices become a floor rather than describe the what is functionally best for your business as a whole.
Security people often retell tales of companies who purchase a security or firewall appliance based on its credentials and perceived pedigree, rack and stack it with little to know thought to the specific configuration required. Utilizing the "out of the box" or pre-configured setting they often unhappily find holes in security they hoped to gain. In this case after chasing out the bad guys and remediating the rules they can recover. In the case of data centers and their networks, a stickiness exists that is challenging and expensive to over come. Once selections are made, contracts signed and equipment placed, it is very unlikely that an exit is economically feasible.
While the person who made the recommendation or purchase decision can attempt to hide, many times successfully behind the excuse they based their decision on established norms or certifications. However the world is maturing and many organizations realize selections based solely on criteria of a few established norms are not sufficient and decision makers are being held accountable for failing to meet the more than minimum requirement.
I suppose this is like having the absolute minimum state requirements for car insurance. Should you have a crash and get sued, you may be responsible for the total cost of damages regardless if your insurance covers it or not.
Likewise when you select a site to host your IT systems and the functionality they provide, just using established industry "standards" alone is actually a very risky approach. After all what you are truly getting with most if not all standards is a minimal or lowest common denominator.
I would assert that it is a better practice to apply an intellectual exercise both, internally and through discovery in the industry to determine which leading edge practices and services are available and important to meet your organizations goals.
On a practical level for many years Data Centers and networks were evaluated on a number easily measured criteria such as; the 9's of availability, N's of redundancy, times to respond, mean time between failures. Entire commercial industries sprung up selling validation of compliance to these measurable characteristics.
I like to equate this to having a '65 Corvette certified to accelerate from 0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds, the problem is I need transportation in Upstate New York where we average 10 feet of snow fall in the winter and on icy roads that car is completely impractical to get anywhere, much less quickly.
Many of these certifications while recognizable and having some comparative value of the minimums completely miss the important criteria for todays and future IT workloads.
Our industry is undergoing a phase of extreme mobility, contraction and expansion. Advents of highly leveraged shared services such as; data exchanges, IOT data collection, Big Data Analytics, social media collection directly with the consumer. Combined with growing shifts in where, when, whom and how data flows. Yielding more concerns about privacy and security while at the same time partnering in data exchange and connective-ness. Doing that with extremely lean organizations, higher dependency on partnering and commodity lower cost devices.
These trends yield an entirely different set of requirements such as; silkiness to a data center ecosphere that allows for dynamic movement rather than stickiness, dial up and down of capacity on demand, dynamic rerouting of links to and through geographies to enable location intimacy, ability to replace or supplement job functions to partner on demand with over stressed organizations.
So while your checking the boxes with your service provider against the floor of minimum standards, please avail yourself to explore how the service provider fulfills your future business needs in the wider context of Next Generation IT. I'm recommending you avoid the trap of getting into an agreement in a sticky center that checks the boxes but isn't practical for your business.
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