Why Google Doesn’t Outsource Data Center Operations

To start off, Outsource means contract (work) out. Now we know human error is one of the root issues revolving around Data Center outages. That just means its avoidable, yet not preventable and is at the expense of the time of the user and the money of the company. Any mistakes just mean a ton of money going down as a loss. About 70 percent of data center reliability incidents are caused by human error on average based on a study by Uptime Institute, which shows only 15.4 percent of incidents at Google data centers were caused by human error over the past two years.

To bring this in terms of Google, we can't. Why? Because they go to the experts, the one percent. Now this one percent is not like the one percent you may find in places like Occupy Wall Street. These are, in Joe Kava, Google’s top data center operations exec, words, " highly qualified people, they are systems thinkers,” he said. “They understand how systems interact and how they work together”.  In fact, very few Googlers are even allowed to visit the company's data centers in the first place which in numerical terms can be less than one percent. The only time someone does get in there is when there is some specific business reason to be there, thus no one is there without a cause or plausible need, ever. Those responsible for the data center handling and operations work along with those who build and design the facilities. This allows consistent feedback and ideas being transferred between the teams, and thus each time a new data center is made, it's better than the previous one.  

     

The reason that Google doesn't outsource is pretty simple. The industry deals with the contractor who hands over the details based on design, the drawings and blueprints, manuals and so on to data center operators. Now the operator usually is not employed by the owner, but instead outsourced to the lowest bidder. This results in the owner having no actual control over the quality of service available nor the assurance that if something goes wrong, the operators will actually do something about it.