Data centers first made their appearance in the 1980s, said Yeung. 'Service providers have had to adapt to changes even faster than business enterprises, incurring initial one-time investment costs, experiencing resource sprawl, economy of scale considerations, and start-up difficulties,' he said. 'Running a data center calls for tremendous flexibility, a keen eye for new technologies and change, as well as the foresight to tailor a wide array of value-added services that provides business advantages for your client.'

A data center is 'a place to locate computer, storage, and networking devices safely and securely which provides power redundancy, [a] temperature-controlled environment and network connectivity for your or your customer's mission-critical systems,' said Andy Mak, VP, PCCW Solutions.

Mak recalled the days when terms like 'computer room' and 'server room' were used'terms which he said had given way to 'Internet data center' (IDC) or 'enterprise data center' (EDC). However, he added that the best facility was an integrated data center that includes 'both IDC and EDC functionalities and features.'

'[A data center] should simply be viewed as an organizational component around which the mechanics of business revolve,' said Kenneth Leung, head of solutions business, Datacraft China/Hong Kong. 'From a business unit perspective, there may be a sales team and a finance group [close to] the data center, supporting their daily business processes. It may not be an organic (i.e. people-based) unit, but nevertheless a functional business sub-unit co-existing with a supporting (IT or MIS) team.'

'A secure, conditioned environment suitable for the installation of IT and communications equipment,' said Norris Hickerson, VP, data center and engineering services, COL. 'However, the scale and scope of any data center is dictated by the needs of the business.' Hickerson said his firm 'provides facilities management as well as disaster recovery services, so our data centers are quite sophisticated. We operate multiple data centers, each of which has multiple levels of infrastructure redundancy to ensure the high availability which are required by our customers.'