We have discussed this before and I'm sure we will talk about it again - government cutbacks and consolidation of cloud hosting. New York has opened an enormous new data center in Brooklyn where the city will centralize all its infrastructure for its agencies of the decade.

It has invested $11 million in equipment for the massive facility and will pay about $3 million yearly to lease the space but in theory it stands to recoup more than $100 million over five years. This of course is where we are currently, the credit crunch is still with us along with the recession and up until a few years ago data center charges were something that organizations didn't really keep an eye on... Now savings in infrastructure can be obtained easily, all government agencies are bearing down on the cloud hosting route. This of course is exacerbated by the fact that all their budgets have been pulled from under them.

Cloud Servers, Ideal for Somebody with Slashed Budgets
However, I don't think this is bad news for people like our organization (who supply cloud hosting) to customers. Consolidations in this industry have always been balanced out by new advances in the industry. That aside, the need for product is still going through the roof as more and more people, organizations and companies come to the way of the cloud. Even though the typical end-user is not buying racks for themselves any more. The actual manufacturers are not slashing their wrists simply because people like us are ordering so many more of them.

Consolidation of Data center Needs
Deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith was quoted as saying "consolidating the city is currently fragmented IT infrastructure into unified data centers is the latest example of how are becoming more efficient city government and achieving the goals that we are after."

With the way that the government purse isbeing cut here in the UK I can see the same thing coming here. Although I'm not confident that all the local councils will club together in the same way that they have done in the USA, I can't really picture Westminster and Manchester Council in conferences deciding whether to purchasea dedicated server between them but if they do we would obviously like to help them with their savings (along with a lot of our competition I'm sure).

Dedicated Server Providers in London - An Overwhelming Choice for the End Client
Obviously we are in a saturated market, and the choice for the client is somewhat overwhelming. I suppose what the government wants a good deal and it is quite a difficult thing to define. Is value for money defined by customer service, or price per rack or another factor? If the service provided is so good that you never have to call the support team and you never experience outages then paying more for high-end support could almost be seen as a waste of money. But of course just like your home insurance it can be comforting to know that if something does go wrong it will get sorted out straight away with the least amount of hassle. Once again to coin an old phrase "you pay your money and you takes your choice."