The cloud plays a vital infrastructure role for many organizations, offering capabilities that are difficult to achieve with bare metal hardware. But bare metal hardware has its own unique set of capabilities that are hard to match in the cloud. Colocated hardware provides the control, performance, and privacy that many organizations require. Each modality has capabilities that organizations need, which is why many companies embrace hybridity, creating platforms that combine the best of colocated hardware and public cloud platforms.
Why Does Data Center Location Matter When Choosing A Colocation Provider?
When choosing a colocation data center provider, there are many factors to consider, including connectivity, reputation, services, support, and cost. But one of the most important is location — where the data center is in the world. Location is central not just because location itself matters, but because location has an impact on many of the other factors I mentioned.
In theory, a datacenter can be built anywhere with power and a connection to the internet, but in reality, location has an impact on the quality the facility is able to offer to its customers. Let’s look at some of the factors that are affected by location.
Why Colocation Is The Right Choice For Your Business
In the modern corporate environment, almost no one wants to build and manage a data center. With very few exceptions, building a data center is not economical and the results rarely meet the standards of the best data centers in the world, which is why so many companies turn to colocation data centers to house their IT infrastructure. Colocation is not the only infrastructure hosting option, but for many companies, it’s the right choice.
The most obvious reason companies choose colocation is that they benefit from all the upsides of a world-class infrastructure hosting venue with none of the downsides of building, staffing, and managing a data center capable of supporting their operations.
The Web Must Get Better At Patching Vulnerable Servers
In October 2016, researchers from Talos discovered and disclosed several critical vulnerabilities in Memcached. Patches were made available, but as of earlier this year, approximately 80% of Memcached instances remain vulnerable. Unpatched Memcached instances present a severe security risk to colocation data center clients.
Colocated Private Clouds Are Less Expensive Than The Public Cloud
In a recent article, I argued that when IT deployments reach a certain size, colocation is the most cost-effective infrastructure option. Supporting that argument is a new report from 451 Research, which shows that private clouds often have a lower total cost of ownership than public cloud platforms.
A private cloud is a cloud platform built on private infrastructure, infrastructure under the control of a single organization. Public cloud platforms, in contrast, are multi-tenant: many organizations launch cloud servers on the same underlying bare metal infrastructure and none have insight into or control over the physical layer.
Who Uses Colocation Data Center Services?
The number of server hosting options available to businesses seems to multiply by the day, but behind the marketing fluff there are really only a few options worth considering: on-premises, cloud, colocation, and dedicated server plans. Each has its place, but I’d like to take a closer look at the types of organization that choose to host infrastructure in a colocation data center and their reasons for choosing colocation instead of the alternatives.
Five Qualities A Premium Colocation Provider Must Have
The colocation industry is home to a vast range of vendors with wildly varying capabilities. At the bottom end of the market, all it takes is the room, power, and bandwidth to house a few servers and keep them connected to the internet most of the time. At the top end of the market are enterprise-grade data centers capable of supporting the largest server deployments and bandwidth requirements, with redundancy built into every level of their operations.
VPS vs. Dedicated Hosting: What’s The Difference?
If you need more resources than shared hosting can offer, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up going with one of two options – either a virtual private server or a dedicated server. Thing is, some hosts are…actually pretty bad at explaining what they are, and how they differ from one another. That’s where we come in.
We’ll clear the air, and help you decide which type of server is the best fit for your organization.
Two Policies That Can Keep Your Business’s Data Safe From Ransomware
Once a nuisance that only affected consumers, ransomware has grown into a huge problem for businesses of all sizes. Over the last few months, ransomware attacks have damaged businesses and government organizations across the world.
Backups Stored On Colocated Servers Neutralize The Ransomware Threat
Incremental back-ups hosted on secure colocated servers are the best defense against ransomware attacks like those that hit healthcare operations across Europe last month. Without isolated, verified back-ups in a secure data center, there’s little an organization can do if its data is lost to a ransomware attack.