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Chapter 5: The Real Costs of Workloads 35 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Turning to managed service providers To help counter some of the people problems associated with deploying and managing data center technology, you may turn to managed services providers. These entities take care of specific technology areas for you, freeing up your most valuable resource — time. The provider handles the installation and management of selected workloads and services. In this context, the firm is on the hook for making sure everything is done correctly. You may still be the person in charge, but the day‐to‐day hassle is someone else's problem. Leasing Remember that pesky business of having to pay for things you want in your data center? You may be able to get out of writ- ing a huge check upfront by using leasing services. Leasing services allow you to rent your infrastructure rather than pay for it all upfront. In this way, it's a bit closer to how you pay for cloud services, although it's still not consumption based. It does, however, enable some financial flexibility, which may allow you to rethink how you implement data center services. There are two primary ways to lease equipment: ✓ Operating lease: You truly rent equipment. You decide what to buy, and the leasing company buys it and rents it back to you for a monthly or annual payment. Of course, there is a lease factor rate, which is basically interest, included in the payment, but if you stick to a strict replacement schedule, you may find that the total of the payments is still less than what you would have paid had you purchased outright. With operating leases, payments are truly operating expenses, and the equipment is never placed on your company's books. ✓ Capital lease: This is closer to a loan, but you still make rental payments for the term of the lease. At the end of the lease period, you may have the option to buy the equipment at a then‐current fair market value or for a $1 buyout, at which point the ownership of the assets will transfer to you.