Data Foundry Blog - Colocation

As business needs evolve, footprints grow and data strategies sometimes change, it’s common for enterprises to relocate their data or find a new colocation data center. Migrating to a new data center may seem intimidating and scary at first, but with the right partner and strategy at the helm, you will be able to navigate a migration with expert support at all times.

Data center jargon can make searching for the right colocation facility challenging for businesses, and when it comes to terms like “purpose-built,” enterprises might be left wondering exactly what that means, why they should pay attention to it or if they even need that at all. Luckily, in the case of this data center term, it’s relatively self-explanatory but that doesn’t mean a closer look at its meaning and the benefits it offers isn’t necessary to guide businesses as they choose their ideal data home. So, if you’ve ever wondered about what the advantages of a purpose-built data center (PBDC) are and why they’re important in today’s digital business, look no further.

With the majority of today’s enterprises pivoting into the digital world, there’s no question about the importance of the data center and its role in empowering next-generation customer experiences and business operation. While the question of colocation versus in-house data center is still much discussed, when the two options are weighed against an increasingly complex business environment, colocation provides several key benefits.

Cloud computing is a mainstay of digital business, and with the public cloud market generating a forecasted worldwide revenue of more than $500 billion by 2025, it’s clear that enterprises across all verticals are utilizing cloud-based capabilities for added agility, scalability and efficiency. The path to the cloud and the way in which businesses integrate it into their IT frameworks, however, can look different depending on the individual use case and the goals they’re trying to meet.

To put it simply, a data center is a physical location that houses critical IT equipment. Typically, that means routers, storage systems, servers, and application delivery controllers, and other key components. A data center allows an organization to centralize its IT operations, equipment, and various ways of storing and processing data. If you’re an IT person, you know that this is integral to how your organization functions—it’s essentially the neural network of your entire company. That’s a big deal.

The Data Center Dilemma: Understanding In-House Solutions Versus Colocation

In the contemporary enterprise landscape, data centers are key drivers and enablers for all things digital business. Whether it’s adopting new applications, incorporating new added-value services for end users, or creating more seamless IT frameworks for better collaboration and productivity, the data flows created and used by the enterprise are more robust than ever. To support these flows of information, data centers provide vital networking, redundant power and cooling infrastructure, business continuity, and information security benefits that are absolutely crucial for enterprise success. While the importance of the data center is clear, the question of whether to maintain an in-house data center strategy or an outsourced colocation approach still remains.

Colocation data centers are an integral part of countless successful enterprises across the globe. It’s not surprising to anyone paying attention to the industry—using a colocation data center has long given businesses options and flexibility that their in-house hosting simply would never be able to match. This gap just keeps widening, something that has become starkly evident thanks to the dramatic increase in demand for remote access employees during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now more than ever enterprises are turning to colocation data centers for their power, security, and IT requirements.

A colocation data center is a data center shared by multiple companies who rent or lease space from the data center’s owner or operator. Colocation data centers are also called multi-tenant data centers. The popularity of these types of data centers has grown since the early 2000s, and analysts predict the colocation industry will continue to grow throughout the 2020s. Many enterprise-sized organizations are seeing value in shutting down some of their own data centers and switching to colocation facilities, which plays a major role in this growth. Small and medium-sized businesses also find value in using colocation because they can own some of their own infrastructure, rather than being tied to the public cloud. There are many reasons for making this choice, most of which revolve around hybrid cloud models and reduced capital expenditure through shared building infrastructure.

Choosing a colocation provider is often a long and grueling process that should involve not only the IT department, but also cybersecurity, finance, executives, and the facilities team, if the company has one. Every team that will be affected by a company’s data center decision should have a say in the process. This will result in the best decision in the long run. Once a company closes a contract with a data center provider, they are often committed to three to five years. Here are seven key steps in selecting the right colocation provider for your business derived from Gartner’s framework.

Compliance is confusing and mind-numbingly boring for most people. Before you can even finish explaining what SSAE stands for (Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements) eyes are glazing over. Unfortunately, data center compliance standards aren’t merely sleeping aids, and not following them is enough to break a company from fines and reputation damage.