Symposium 2013: The Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution™
The critical environment in which we operate today to deliver enterprise computing is evolving faster than ever. Today’s IT Executives, Data Center Managers and Operators, and Data Center Planners, Designers and Engineers, are faced with significant business and technical opportunities, challenges and decisions. Each of these has a critical impact on the enterprise Digital Infrastructure. Uptime Institute defines Digital Infrastructure as embracing the totality of the enterprise computing environment and data center facilities (whether owner-operator or third-party) supporting their business- and mission-critical end users.
The theme for Uptime Institute Symposium 2013 was The Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution. IT and data center thought-leaders and innovators from around the world met at the Santa Clara Convention Center to consider the present and future state of the Digital Infrastructure and strategies on how to best evaluate the alternatives and make the best decisions for their organizations within this rapidly changing environment.
Symposium 2013: Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution™ featured three tracks:
Digital Infrastructure Investment, Finance and Business Strategy. Today’s executives must be able to measure, benchmark and improve the efficacy of their organizations’ Digital Infrastructure investments in often wholly new ways. This track focused on providing executives with the tools and methodologies to gather data across the various, often disparate, divisions and disciplines within their organizations to make better decisions.
Data Center Management and Operational Excellence. This track focused on management best practices, benchmarking and buying trends. The speakers in this track will help data center and IT operations staff avoid infrastructure downtime, run operations efficiently, and improve capacity planning accuracy.
Data Center Design Innovation. This track constitutes deep technical engagement and dialogue with design professionals, facilities managers and corporate real estate executives on groundbreaking case studies, product innovations and design advances.
In 2012, Uptime Institute developed the FORCSS Methodology. FORCSS is a structured processfor capturing, analyzing, comparing and prioritizing financial, business and organizational performanceand risk factors that drive IT-dependent business decisions. The Institute facilitated a selectgroup of predominately end-user enterprise data center executives (now known as the FORCSS Coalition) to further refine the methodology at a series of Uptime Institute Charrette events.
FORCSS is a communication framework that recognizes and weighs the benefits and exposures of Digital Infrastructure deployment alternatives among internal data centers and the various approaches to third-party IT service provision (cloud, colo or multi-tenant hosting, and managed services).
FORCSS was developed to help overcome organizational "blind spots" with the flexibility to respond to varying business and organizational needs. Composed of six key selection metrics, FORCSS is designed to ensure effective investment by providing a holistic but succinct evaluation framework for key alternatives intended to avoid "analysis paralysis."
The sessions in this Special Focus on FORCSS concentrated on how organizations can best meet those challenges and give senior executives the planning tools, framework and data they need to make better decisions, and better investments for their organizations.
To see more photos from Symposium 2013, go to our Flickr page.
From 2008 to 2010, Uptime Institute founder and Ken Brill shared his "uncommon common-sense" ideas on the IT and data center industry in a series of columns on Forbes.com. Click here to download a compilation of these columns.
