5 REASONS TO CONSIDER A COLOCATION DATA CENTER

The market is abundant with solutions to help businesses take care of their IT needs. Managed Services, cloud, hybrid cloud, disaster recovery, network and service support are a few and the list goes on and on. The term colocation is one of many that has shown up in the wave of solutions that decision makers must place on their scales of cost vs benefit.

Colocation in the simplest terms is when you the business provide the equipment, and the colocation provider (data center) hosts your equipment in their special purposed facility. The gear is owned by the customer and the host provides the space, power, connectivity and security for reliable access to the customer’s gear and data. There are various reasons to consider colocation for your IT assets, but we have listed 5 to get the conversation rolling.

1. Security Colocation providers house your gear in facilities that are designed to protect and secure them from undesired access or risk. Security measures may include controlled gates, security personnel, biometric scanners, CCTV cameras, coded access panels, alarm systems and unique keyed rack access. The cost benefit of utilizing a colocation provider for most customers is that of not incurring expensive investments in physical infrastructure and technologies. By design, these costs are shared among the various colocation tenants hosted by the data center.

2. Stability Colocation facilities are designed to provide stable and reliable access to gear and data. This stability is created when redundant power, cooling and connectivity is offered to customers over and beyond that of normal business facilities. Utility outages and physical threats from natural disasters can often plague businesses when they least expect it. Colocation providers mitigate these risks for customers by providing backup and redundant power, diverse carrier options, and physical structures that are designed to resist weather and natural disasters.

3. Scalability Do your IT needs fluctuate with the season or have they grown too quickly to keep up with? Colocation providers can provide environments that can be scaled to meet the needs of various tenants and business types. Out sourcing the power, security, cooling and connectivity headaches of IT infrastructure can offer your team and budgets the flexibility to focus on daily tasks and projects that compete for valuable resources.

4. Connectivity Colocation providers house your gear in climate controlled data centers offering high bandwidth speeds and carrier redundancies for important network connections. Colocation tenants can escape the high costs to purchase and maintain expensive network infrastructure in their own offices by hosting their gear in a data center. Carrier neutral colocation providers can also offer competitively priced connectivity to their customers. In carrier dense data centers, ISP’s compete for access to coveted business clients who need reliable high speed bandwidth.

5. Predictability Colocation providers can also turn normally unpredictable and expensive IT capital expenditures into predictable monthly expenses. Colocation customers only pay for their gear hosted in a colocation facility and not the entire cost of running and maintaining a complicated, state of the art data center. Your business will have the freedom to plan and budget for typical IT needs without the worry of expensive capital IT infrastructure improvements.

Is your company experiencing the pain and or fear of dealing with a growing IT infrastructure? Contact our experienced team here at RACK59 for a colocation consult and let us walk you through the process to determine if colocation would be right for your business.