* How data center consolidation leads to cost savings

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 05/31/05

In our most recent research on enterprise security, we discovered an interesting correlation between the cost of patch management and the number of locations housing servers, rather than the number of servers. Against our intuition, even very large companies with thousands of servers could manage their patches with a few people - as long as the servers were centralized.

Having multiple locations means having IT staff widely distributed also, which leads to increased operational costs. Data-center consolidation, a trend we have been following for a few years, has the effect of reducing costs by concentrating resources at a few locations. The natural extension to this trend is the zero-footprint branch. The goal is to move as many of the systems that are at the branch office to the data center, and thereby reduce the need for local IT staff.