The question is a common one for today’s chief financial officers: Do we keep our in-house data center or hire a third party to manage it, or outsource it entirely? Charles McLellan at ZDNet has a primer for companies considering the question. He writes about a survey from 2011 that showed data storage and retrieval was the most prevalent type of workload deployed on cloud infrastructure. By 2014, that category was expected to be joined by transaction processing, batch computing, web services and high-performance computing/analytics. One reason for taking the virtual data center route is saving on energy costs, McLellan says: “For reasons of energy and cost efficiency, IT decision-makers will want to virtualise their data centres, remove or repurpose any ‘comatose’ servers, and in many cases outsource the data centre entirely.” Here is McLellan’s article: article