Businesses face increasing pressure to maintain robust, secure, and scalable IT infrastructure. Many companies find themselves at a crossroads, weighing the benefits of on-premises solutions against cloud-based alternatives. However, a third, often overlooked option can provide the best of both worlds: colocation services.
Colocation offers businesses a unique blend of control, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. By housing your hardware in a purpose-built data center, you retain ownership and management of your equipment while benefiting from enterprise-grade facilities and support. This approach has gained traction across various industries, from finance to healthcare, as organizations seek to optimize their IT operations.
The Strategic Advantages of Colocation
Enhanced Security and Reliability
Datacenter colocation facilities offer security measures that surpass what most businesses can implement on their own. These facilities provide 24/7 on-site security personnel, biometric access controls, advanced fire suppression systems, and redundant power supplies. By utilizing these features, businesses can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches, physical theft, and service interruptions. Colocation providers invest heavily in these security measures, ensuring that your critical infrastructure remains protected around the clock.
Cost-Effective Scalability
One of the most compelling reasons to consider colocation solutions is their cost-effectiveness, especially when it comes to scaling your infrastructure. Colocation allows you to avoid large capital expenditures on facility construction or renovation. Instead, you pay only for the space and resources you need, easily expanding your footprint as your business grows. This flexibility can result in substantial savings compared to building and maintaining your data center.
Access to Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure
Colocation providers invest heavily in state-of-the-art infrastructure to support their clients’ needs. This includes high-speed, redundant internet connections, advanced cooling systems, and robust power distribution units. By leveraging these resources, businesses can achieve a level of performance and reliability that would be prohibitively expensive to replicate in-house. The economies of scale achieved by colocation services allow even small to medium-sized businesses to access enterprise-grade infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of building it themselves.
Comparing Colocation to Other IT Infrastructure Options
To better understand the value proposition of colocation, let’s compare it to other common IT infrastructure approaches:
| Feature | Colocation | On-Premises | Public Cloud |
| Initial Cost | Medium | High | Low |
| Ongoing Costs | Predictable | Variable | Can be unpredictable |
| Control over Hardware | High | High | Limited |
| Scalability | Flexible | Limited | Highly flexible |
| Security | High | Varies | High, but shared responsibility |
| Maintenance Responsibility | Shared | Full | Limited |
| Customization | High | High | Limited |
| Geographic Redundancy | Available | Expensive | Built-in |
This comparison highlights the unique balance colocation strikes between control, cost, and capabilities.
Implementing a Colocation Strategy
Assessing Your Needs
Before diving into colocation, conduct a thorough assessment of your IT requirements. This should include evaluating your current and projected server needs, network bandwidth requirements, power consumption estimates, and disaster recovery objectives. This information will prove invaluable in choosing the right colocation provider and package that aligns with your business goals and technical needs.
Choosing the Right Provider
When selecting a colocation partner, several factors come into play. To begin with, it’s very important to read into their location and how accessible their facilities are, as well as the range of services they provide (including remote hands and network service), uptime guarantees and SLA, certification (like SSAE 18 or ISO 27001), and just how good and available their customer support is. To have a good idea of each provider’s capacity and reliability, it’s important to your potential facilities and talk with current clients.
Planning the Migration
Moving your infrastructure to a colocation facility is not a trivial task and requires careful planning. Typically, this process involves inventorying your current equipment, designing your new rack layout, scheduling the physical move, configuring network connections, and testing all systems post-move. Migration assistance is provided by many colocation providers, and this can simplify this process immensely as well as minimize the downtime that often accompanies the transition.
Maximizing the Benefits of Colocation
Hybrid IT Strategies
Colocation doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing solution. Many companies adopt a hybrid approach, combining colocation with cloud services. It lets you keep your most important data in dedicated hardware and expand into the cloud for seasonal peaks in demand, and use cloud services for your less important workloads. With careful orchestration of your hybrid environment, you can ensure that your hybrid environment performs at its optimal level, and achieves security and cost-effectiveness across your entire IT infrastructure.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Colocation facilities often serve as excellent disaster recovery sites. By replicating your data and systems to a geographically distant colocation center, you can ensure rapid recovery in case of a primary site failure, meet regulatory requirements for data protection, and regularly test and refine your disaster recovery plans. Many colocation providers offer specialized disaster recovery services, including dedicated recovery spaces and expert support during failover events, further enhancing your business continuity capabilities.
Leveraging Managed Services
Managed services offered by your provider will further boost the value of your colocation investment. They can be remote hands for hardware maintenance, managed security services, network optimization, and backup and recovery management. Outsourcing these tasks to your colocation partner allows your IT team to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business growth and innovation.
The Future of Colocation
Colocation services are evolving with technological advancements. The (emerging) trends include the support for IoT as well as 5G applications on edge computing, AI-driven data center management for improved efficiency, more focus on sustainability and green energy use, and integration of software-defined networking for more flexibility. Staying abreast of these developments will not only let a business stay future-proof on its colocation strategy but also in conjunction with long-term IT objectives.
Conclusion
Given the compelling solution colocation services represent for business IT infrastructure optimization, it is not surprising that colocation services are worth noting. Colocation creates a unique value proposition of combining the control and customization of on-premises systems, with the scalability and cost efficiency of cloud services. When looking at the viability of an IT strategy, taking co-location into account allows you to evaluate how it can bring your performance, security, and financial goals to life.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the difference between colocation and cloud hosting?
Colocation is simply the data center we behind the scenes run hardware out of and we tend to sync your equipment and software. Whereas cloud hosting uses virtualized resources managed by the provider with some degree of flexibility but little control, web hosting allows you to manage the server much more.
2. But what types of businesses benefit the most from colocation?
If you have certain types of hardware you need to run, have very high-security requirements, or need to maximize costs while still being able to keep control of your IT infrastructure, colocation is the one for you. The finance, healthcare, and e-commerce industries are usually attracted to colocation.
3. Can I still use cloud services if I choose colocation?
Absolutely. Many businesses adopt a hybrid approach, using colocation for core systems and sensitive data while leveraging cloud services for specific applications or to handle traffic spikes. This strategy combines the benefits of both worlds.
