Data Foundry Blog - Colocation

Every data center search should begin with identifying business goals and the long-term infrastructure requirements to help accomplish those goals. Once you’ve determined your top IT infrastructure goals, whether that means improving availability, connectivity, adding disaster recovery options, decreasing capital expenses, or a combination of the above, it’s up to you to look for a data center that meets business needs. To really understand if a facility can meet those needs, you will need to gather detailed information on the power structure, cooling equipment, utility infrastructure, security and more of your top facilities.

So, your company is considering colocation as a viable IT infrastructure strategy. How do you convince your CFO that it’s the right move? Convincing your CFO revolves around risk aversion and cost management. To help your CFO see the benefits of your decision, address the opportunity cost of the other options you’ve evaluated, discuss capital expenditure (CapEx) versus operational expenditure (OpEx), and address how colocation minimizes risk and cost to your organization.

Are you considering moving to the cloud? You aren’t alone. All the hype would have you believe that companies are moving assets to the cloud in droves and shutting down their data center operations. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Uptime Institute’s 2016 Data Center Industry Survey found that 71% of companies maintain assets in enterprise-owned data centers, 20% maintain assets in colocation facilities and just 9% keep assets in the cloud. While there is an increase in the adoption of cloud services year over year, this growth appears to be conservative.

With the ever-increasing number of services available, there are many options to choose from when it comes to setting up IT infrastructure for small businesses. So, why do smaller companies end up choosing colocation? We have seen many SMBs and startups switch over to colocation after carefully weighing all their options, or after finding themselves stuck with skyrocketing cloud bills when their business starts to take off. Here are seven key benefits they reap after deciding to colocate in a purpose-built, carrier-neutral data center.

We’ve heard a lot lately about REIT data centers (Real Estate Investment Trust) and poor customer service. The underlying purpose of a REIT is buying, selling and leasing real estate, or data center space in this case. These companies are not service-focused, and they outsource the majority of their operations and customer support. For instance, many of the technicians, facility managers and security staff that work for the largest colocation companies are hired on a contract basis from third-party vendors.

Choosing a colocation provider is often a multi-year commitment. While colocation does provide greater flexibility and scalability than building a company data center, the level of scalability and flexibility will differ between colocation facilities. It’s essential to choose a data center that will allow for your expansion, not only in terms of space but also in terms of power and density. Apart from choosing your provider, there are other things your team can do to future-proof your deployment. Here’s how you can help ensure your deployment is set up for future growth so you don’t have to worry about an infrastructure overhaul for several years to come.

If building and operating enterprise data centers was always the best course of action, all the companies that had the cash flow to do so would do it. There are several reasons Fortune 5 companies continue to engage colocation providers rather than exclusively running their own data centers. These are seven reasons we hear repeatedly from large corporations that utilize colocation as part of their IT strategy.