“Building and managing a data center is best left up to the experts,” writes Gary MacFadden in his latest Professional Alert: “Switch SuperNAP Cloud Infrastructure Service Does the Heavy Lifting for IT.” At Wikibon’s April 23, 2013 Peer Incite, Jason Mendenhall, EVP of Cloud for Switch Communications argued that Switch’s SuperNAP colocation center in Las Vegas is helping to change the IT industry’s view of cloud services. “Today the question is ‘which cloud?’, not if a company should adopt a cloud strategy,” he said.

Moving non-differentiated tasks and services to a colocation center or service provider provides several benefits that help ITOs run more efficiently and focus on the services that can provide the business with measurable competitive advantage, he writes. These are:

• Resource re-allocation,

• Recruitment and retention improvement,

• Expense redirection,

• Technology refresh avoidance,

• Instantaneous scalability, and,

• IT simplification.

Like all Wikibon research, this Alert is available in full without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register to join the Wikibon community. Membership allows them to post their own questions, tips, and research, as well as comment on published research on the site. Members also receive invitations to the periodic Peer Incite Meetings at which their peers present on how they are using advanced technologies to solve business and technical challenges.