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.
Cost Control
The core benefit of a colocation data center is shared costs, enabling companies to take advantage of some of the best facilities in the world without having to make a huge capital investment.
Of course, there will be a capital investment for servers and other hardware, but the data center itself — the land, the building, the redundant bandwidth connections, the state-of-the-art power and cooling systems, the staffing, the compliance — needn’t be a burden on IT budgets. Sharing the costs with other organizations allows businesses to leverage the capabilities of an enterprise-grade data center without the enterprise-grade price tag.
Focus On Your Business’ Core Concerns
Cost saving isn’t the only benefit: in an ideal world, organizations should have a laser-sharp focus on their core business model. Many businesses outsource everything they can because, while they need services like support, catering, and telecommunications, there’s little benefit to keeping the organizational overhead within the business. Let someone else take care of it.
100% Uptime
The real challenge when building a data center is providing 100% uptime no matter the demands placed on the data center’s infrastructure. When a company relies on its IT infrastructure, any downtime can result in lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and missed opportunities.
To achieve 100% uptime, a data center must be engineered so that any hardware or connectivity failure isn’t felt by the customer or their users. That’s only possible because data centers like our Atlanta colocation facility have multiple redundancies built into every systems. Power is supplied by several different vendors and in the unlikely event that every vendor fails, the data center has backup generators. The same is true of bandwidth: multiple connections to multiple providers make the risk of an outage as close to zero as possible.
Compliance
As any CIO will tell you, compliance costs inflate the price-tag of in-house infrastructure deployments. Maintaining a fully compliant data center requires a large investment of money and manpower. Superior colocation data centers do much of the work of security and privacy compliance at the network and physical security level. Colocation clients are responsible for ensuring that they handle data in a responsible fashion that complies with relevant regulations, but a good colocation provider is a sound foundation to build on.
Colocation is a right choice for any organizations that wants to minimize capital investment in infrastructure construction and management, that values the ability to outsource data center management, that requires 100% uptime for services and applications, and that demands a secure and compliant environment in which to host their infrastructure.