IT and data centre relocation
Moving infrastructure is a cutover project with a transport component. What to plan, what to verify, and where decommissioning quietly becomes a data-security question.
An IT relocation is judged on one thing: whether the business can work on Monday. That makes it a cutover project rather than a moving job, and it is planned backwards from the moment service has to resume.
Planning backwards from cutover
- Fix the moment service must resume, then schedule everything backwards from it with slack built in.
- Establish what runs during the move: nothing, a degraded service, or a temporary environment.
- Audit and label every asset, then reconcile the inventory at both ends rather than only at the destination.
- Confirm destination readiness before anything is unracked: power, cooling, structured cabling, network circuits live and tested.
- Agree who unracks, transports, racks, cables and tests, and who signs off that each system is working.
- Plan the rollback. If cutover fails at 3am, the answer to what happens next should already exist.
Decommissioning is a data question, not a disposal question
Data centre decommissioning gets treated as the tidy-up at the end of a project, and it is where the real risk sits. Equipment leaving your control may still hold data, and the obligation to account for that does not transfer with the hardware.
Establish in writing how drives are sanitised or destroyed, what evidence you receive per device, who holds custody between your rack and the destruction, and what happens to equipment resold rather than destroyed. A serial-numbered certificate per device is the standard to ask for.
Verify the carrier as well as the integrator
IT relocation is often sold by a technology firm that subcontracts the physical transport. That is normal, and it means there are two companies to check rather than one.
Look the transporting carrier up in FMCSA's mover database and confirm registration status and business type, the same as you would for any interstate move. Ask the integrator directly who is driving.