Hardware

The Value of Modernizing the K–12 Data Center

Research shows that organizations tend to hold on to technology too long.

Calvin Hennick is a freelance journalist who specializes in business and technology writing. He is a contributor to the CDW family of technology magazines.

Many schools and districts struggle with the question of when and how to replace aging technology. Administrators and school boards want to stretch their technology dollars as far as possible, but waiting too long to refresh can result in subpar instruction, bloated maintenance budgets and security vulnerabilities.

Along with updating their classroom technology, school districts must continually refresh their back-end infrastructure to prevent performance problems and support teaching and learning. However, many organizations hold on to data center equipment for too long, according to a 2019 report from Forrester:

51 percent of organizations refresh their servers less frequently than every three to four years.
16 percent of server hardware is more than 5 years old.
Only 28 percent of organizations say applications running on their infrastructure are able to completely meet users’ needs.
95 percent of organizations see long-term value in software-defined data center solutions, but only 27 percent have made significant investments in the technology.
42 percent of respondents cite improved productivity as a driver of data center refreshes; meanwhile, 41 percent say that modernizing their data center infrastructure boosts security
47 percent of organizations report improved systems reliability after replacing aging data center hardware with modern infrastructure; 39 percent report improved application performance and say that modernizing infrastructure leads to faster application updates.