by Mark Hall

June 9, 2008 (Computerworld) Your next data center will be more mental than physical, more of an abstract location in your mind than a place you can show visitors on a company tour. Oh, sure, you run IT, so for the foreseeable future, it's likely there will be a server room or two that's a stone's throw from your office. But the showcase glass house days are behind us. Good thing, too.

Designing, locating, running and relocating data centers for business is damn hard work. Expensive work, too.

If you glean nothing else from the excellent selection of stories presented in this special report, you will learn that data center management is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it strategic to most businesses, which is why your next data center will be more a part of how you think, and less and less a part of the building you work in.

Less 'There' There

IT's quick embrace of software as a service, virtualization, Web services, utility computing and other new ways to abstract and outsource operations and applications isn't just buzzword fashion. It's a fundamental shift in thinking about delivering IT to business.

No longer are you restricted to what your team, your infrastructure, your budget or your data center can handle. You can look beyond your firewall and find subscription-based resources to offload everything from simple patching and backup of your networked PCs to delivering enterprise-class applications such as general ledger, supply chain and CRM tools. You can even slap your logos on someone else's software and pretend that you did it yourself.

Yes, there's been outsourcing of software since ADP started its payroll services. And, yes, there always has been an EDS, an Accenture, an IBM Services and countless others ready to strike you a custom deal to run some of your IT goodies and offload your data center.

But today, the scale of outsourcing options and the choices of business software online is staggering. You can outsource any IT task to anywhere on the globe, and you can rent everything from desktop productivity applications to customizable ERP software.

And you do. Survey after survey indicates that IT is getting out of the way as line-of-business managers make direct deals with SaaS vendors to get the software their departments want.

More studies show that IT is racing ahead with server virtualization projects to consolidate machines in the data center. And IT shops themselves are outsourcing more operational management duties to third parties with large, centralized monitoring centers.

If running your own data center were easy and cheap, none of this would be necessary. But it's neither. So, CIOs must fully grasp the reality that every IT demand that must be met can't be fulfilled by shoehorning more resources inside the shrinking corporate data center. You need to know when and what to let go.

Still, just because the people doing IT work aren't on your payroll, that doesn't mean you can be oblivious to what they do. Now more than at any other time in IT history, CIOs must clearly understand how IT works for the business. And you have to be able to effectively communicate your understanding to those up and down a company org chart.

Today, you need to have a mental picture of how SaaS-resident data mixes with corporate information systems. You need to envision how outsourced IT monitoring works with your in-house response team. You need to see how fast and far to push virtualization projects to relieve the pressures inside your physical data center. And when new projects are thrown your way, you need to conjure the resources they will require as abstractions that can go anywhere, rather than as extra burdens for your data center.

Today's data center is a layered abstraction that increasingly defies our senses. But the best CIOs can see it with crystal clarity — in their minds.