Companies that are either buying or building data center capability should not take business-continuity and risk-assessment planning for granted. In recent discussions with Baseline, four data center experts made the following recommendations and observations:

1. Maintenance procedures should incorporate best practices. Physical security should be a big part of the site management program, says Julian Kudritzki, vice president of development and operations at Uptime Institute Professional Services, a provider of educational and consulting services for IT shops. He recommends checking on the data center’s history of outages, as well as making sure the staff is well-trained and the environment is clean.

2. Locating a data center—or choosing a co-location provider—that is close to your operations has pluses and minuses. “Though choosing a co-location provider that’s nearby saves time for tasks, such as racking up a server, it prevents you from taking advantage of lower-cost facilities that may exist elsewhere,” Galen Schreck, an analyst at Forrester Research, wrote in a recent report. “Depending on the provider you select, you may be able to use some basic remote services to handle physical configuration tasks, while running your operations remotely.”

There’s another reason for not having your data center and co-location center too close. “Events that are likely to knock out power are often regional,” says Tom Deaderick, director of OnePartner Advanced Technology & Applications Center, a co-location site.