The Cold War left behind, if nothing else, some hot property. This is especially so if you are in the market for the ultimate in secure datacentres and don’t mind operating out of an isolated spot high on the Lincolnshire Wolds, on
England’s windy East Coast. That is what Lincoln-based managed services specialist, CentriNet, found when the company discovered an ex-Ministry of Defence Radar station - nuclear bomb-proof with 4-metre thick walls, some 30 feet under the ground, and with the bulk of a necessary refurbishment already done – was going for a snip. And what has this to do with anything? Well, in part it has to do with the fact, if any business is looking for a supplier of a highly secure hosting service – actually finding the place is hard enough, let alone getting through the security procedures – that is exactly what SmartBunker is designed to provide. 

But in part it also represents a potentially important little marker along the road towards a major seachange that I feel all IT users will need to face up to and learn to live with – Utility Computing. In addition, I suspect it can provide a useful testing ground for companies looking at how to integrate Utility services because it offers such a precise specialism.  What CentriNet is offering is a service that is well beyond the capabilities of most companies – finding a nuclear bomb-proof bunker and then equipping it properly as a datacentre is a budget-buster for all but the biggest players. But the other side of that coin is a simple question: if the investment needed was much less of an issue, how many business managers would feel the need to have something like SmartBunker? How many businesses would find it very useful – or at least comforting – if they could have their important business processes and data tucked into a corner of such a place? 

That capability – the chance for most companies to have available, on tap, a level of service provision and resources that is well beyond their individual capital investment plans – is the choice that Utility Computing will offer to business managers. In addition, they will be able to pick and choose from a whole roster of available services, balancing their business needs against their budgets. The downside to it all is the perception that, because they are sharing resources, they somehow will not be `owning their own data’. Well, logically, the more data that is kept in digital form the less companies `own’ it anyway. I suspect that the `owned’ data that is stored on most company infrastructures is far less secure than in SmartBunker today, and in any service provider’s facilities in the future – the security of customers’ data and operating environments has to be a core business process for them, otherwise they will die quickly. The same cannot be said about many companies’ respect for their own data. 

Couple this with the growth in managed services – CentriNet’s core business in fact – and you have the makings of a valuable test exercise for many businesses. At base level it is already a good testing ground for integrating a high security hosted environment. It is also a good test of off-loading the management overhead onto a managed, hosted service.   But that high security piece adds one more dimension that also offers a chance to test a switch to a service provision-oriented environment. Here the fact that this service is going to be rare, and beyond the means of most businesses, makes the ability to share its resources attractive. It will also make it, perhaps in the long run, an ideal platform for testing the service levels, capabilities and the operational integration issues, of running with a service provided as a utility.