Procuring and Managing Storage Infrastructure

Introduction

An organisation can reach an entirely defensible decision to retain servers in colocation, buy managed hosting or migrate applications to public cloud, yet still procure a contract that undermines the business case. The apparent simplicity of renting space, selecting a migration partner or extending hardware support gives way to dependencies between facilities, equipment, networks, applications and the people responsible for recovery. The question is how those responsibilities are allocated, priced and governed when the estate is changing.

Parts 1 and 2 considered the choices available for an existing infrastructure estate and the business-case implications of those choices. This concluding briefing follows the decision into procurement: identifying the services to be purchased, understanding the available routes to market, selecting suppliers, negotiating contractual flexibility and managing performance. It also examines a distinctive feature of the UK public-sector landscape: the single-supplier Crown Hosting framework and the wider choices available beyond it.

The commercial objective is to acquire an appropriate level of service and retain effective control as workloads are moved, retired or redesigned. That requires meaningful competition where feasible, clarity over supplier incentives and accountability that survives contract award.

Storage requirements should influence the route to market

Colocation purchases the physical operating environment for customer-controlled equipment: space, power, cooling, facility security and contracted ancillary services. It normally leaves the customer responsible for the lifecycle of its servers, storage and network equipment, although a separate supplier may maintain them. A managed hosting service moves more responsibility to the host; public cloud provides infrastructure and platform resources; migration services perform the work of…