I remember the first time I set foot in a real data center. It was roughly 26 years ago. That’s where the magic happened. That’s where the serious IT engineering work was done. At the time, I was a desktop support technician. After a few years, I advanced my career to the point where I was qualified to work in the data center. I was elated.

I loved every aspect of it. The ice-cold air conditioning, the blinking LED lights, the chirps of whirring hard drives, the raised floor tiles, and the satisfaction of neat and orderly cable management. That is what real, professional, enterprise-grade IT looked like, and I had a job right in the heart of it. This was the nerve center of the enterprise.

I experienced my most formative leadership lesson as a young tech professional inside a data center. One Friday afternoon, I made a terrible mistake that blew up the whole thing. The enterprise went dark. How I was treated at the moment, and in the aftermath set me up for how I lead today. This was the subject of the very first Zach on Leadership article. You can read it here.

For the next 15 years or so, I worked in, or closely adjacent to the corporate data centers. I got to be the one to give tours to customers and business executives. We always kept our data centers clean and show-worthy. Onlookers would marvel at the advanced technology.

The cloud

For quite a while, the public cloud coexisted alongside the corporate data centers. It was nice to have both, but for all of the really serious workloads, we ran those out of the data centers. That was just fine, for a while. Then, around 2018 or so, that all changed. The public cloud advanced to the point where it wasn’t only equivalent to a data center, but in many ways had surpassed it in enterprise capability, and cost efficiency. This was a major epiphany for me. I wrote all about it here.

Not long after that, we made a strategic declaration, that we would move our corporate data centers to the cloud. We started with a major anchor workload, then little by little, migrated everything else. This was an enormous effort that took years. Like all major technology initiatives, we had our fair share of setbacks, but the team conquered them all.

This week, we finished the cleanout of our old data center facilities. With everything running in the cloud, we don’t need them anymore.

The end of an era

Long before I started my career, corporate data centers were well established. My company, CHS, built our first data center back in 1964. I hadn’t even been born yet. We’re closing the door on a massive chapter of the history of computing. I will likely never step foot inside a data center ever again. A few years ago, I walked into one for the last time, without realizing it would be the last time. For 61 years, my company has had a corporate data center, but no longer.

As a tech professional, you’d think I’d be used to this, after all, technology has a pretty short shelf life. We replace laptops and phones every 3-5 years. Applications need a good rewrite every 5-15 years, depending on the stack. Sure, we have a few applications that have been around forever, but those are in the minority.

This serves as a good reminder that our work product is temporary. It doesn’t last long, and that’s okay. What does last is the relationships we build, the people we invest in, the customers we serve, and the leaders we develop. That’s the good stuff, but it all happens in the context of technologies that are here today and gone tomorrow.

Cloud-native

I had to take a moment to reflect because I’m sentimental (for an IT guy). These data centers, servers, and networks have served us well for years. But the future is cloud, and now that we are fully on it, we can take full advantage of everything it has to offer. That’s exciting. We’ve come a long way and have earned ourselves the opportunity to do what has never been done before.

The leadership lesson

There’s a leadership lesson in all of this, that you can apply to a variety of situations. It’s important to honor the past. To recognize what we’ve done, where we’ve been, and how it shaped us. Yet, we can’t let that hold us back. We cannot allow ourselves to get stuck in the past or the present. We need to look to the future at all times. We need to cast a vision and a strategy to get there. We need to lead our teams along the journey, one step at a time.

Honor the past. Look to the future. Stay the course. I’m glad I got to be a part of the data center era of computing, but I’m ready to let it go.

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