Why Colocation is the Solution for Critical IT Operations

According to the 2017 Frost & Sullivan survey, 68% of businesses leverage colocation services in their hybrid IT environment. 70% of IT leaders also plan to increase their colocation deployments over the next two years.

The prevalence of big data and the increasing adoption of IoT devices have put increased emphasis on network capacity and performance. With more and more businesses living and dying by their system availability, reliability and security, a shift toward colocation was inevitable.  

What is colocation and why have businesses increasingly incorporated it into their plans?

Colocation: Simplified

Rather than building your own private infrastructure, rental equipment, space and bandwidth are available from a colocation provider. Colocation partners equip you with space, power, cooling and physical security to run your network with minimal cost and complexity. Unlike public clouds, you maintain control of your applications when working with a colocation provider.

The main components you can rent when working with a colocation facility include:

• Servers – the computers or programs that manage access to your network
• Cabinets – the lockable unit that houses a server rack
• Cages – a lockable server space surrounded by mesh walls
• Suites – a lockable suite completely enclosed by solid partitions
• Modules – the components that offer scalable capacity within the data center

What are the Benefits of Colocation?

IT leaders have typically adopted colocation in order to scale beyond their private data centers without the steep cost of infrastructure expansion. Yet, there’s a much greater draw to colocation than the added space and power. Colocation providers offer businesses a more realistic way to modernize and optimize their network operations.

Though public clouds have been a go-to solution for some businesses, many IT leaders can’t afford to surrender control of their critical and sensitive applications. Colocation facilities stand out for your ability to tweak or customize the infrastructure you rent in order to achieve your desired performance and business objectives.

How do these fundamental benefits impact your operations and bottom line?

• Lower infrastructure and management costs
  Minimizing infrastructure costs is often the main basis for supplementing private data centers with colocation services. Minimizing management costs is often the drive behind switching applications from public clouds to colocation data centers (though it also applies to the former scenario). Rather than investing in the many components required to support a growing data center, businesses can rely on far more predictable operating expenses with colocation.
• Superior power capacity
  Growing businesses with private data centers often face challenges in ramping up their power capacity. Especially if you’re upgrading to applications that require high-density power, colocation providers offer far greater power-per-square than the typical private data center.
• Greater uptime and redundancy
  Your operations depend on securing utmost network reliability. 99.999% availability is becoming the new baseline requirement, limiting annual downtime to 5.39 minutes. But achieving such reliability – not to mention seven 9s of uptime – can be both difficult and incredibly costly. By customizing your network configurations, you can develop a network that ensures the reliability and availability you need, while benefiting from the extensive redundancies and precautions implemented by your colocation provider.
• Local support
  For many performance-sensitive applications and workloads, minimizing network latency is dependent on your proximity to your end-users. With colocation providers that have data centers across the United States and world, you can house data closer to your customers without building your own local facilities and hiring local technicians.
• Data security and disaster recovery
  As data breaches become increasingly rampant – and data regulations more strict – the demand for fortified security has never been higher. Included is the need to protect your precious data from fires and natural disasters. Colocation facilities can more readily invest in monitoring, security recovery measures, including 24/7 onsite security, access controls and more.

Does Your Business Need Colocation?

While you may not need to migrate all of your workloads to a colocation solution, many businesses run their most important applications through this growing computing model. The Frost & Sullivan survey shows some of the most common workloads deployed through colocation:

What are your most important applications? How much could you improve your performance and reduce your costs?

Find out today by requesting a data center quote.