Unify IT with a Hybrid Model: Cloud and Colocation

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In the race to digitally transform and maintain competitive advantages in the face of expanding requirements and a changing business environment, the cloud has become a key component in modern IT. When trying to optimize speed, efficiency, scalability, and agility, the cloud offers a range of services that enhance data mobility, application performance, and more.

Still, the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and it can be used to scale your enterprise. Now, despite the cloud remaining a key element of digital transformation for many businesses, hybrid IT is growing as a widely adopted model. What is hybrid IT? Before we take a deep dive into the full meaning, hybrid IT leverages the power of both the cloud and on-prem solutions. Offering advantages such as the ability to move workloads between private clouds, public clouds, on-premises infrastructure, and colocation facilities to maximize security or costs. A hybrid IT strategy enables more tailor-made solutions that suit individual business goals. With the addition of colocation, however, comes the task of finding the right data center partner.

Hybrid IT Explained

A hybrid IT strategy is an architecture that involves utilizing services, storage, or computing resources across a combination of public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure. Naturally, every hybrid strategy will look different due to each organization’s varying application allocation and various employed clouds. Still, the benefits are consistent as hybrid strategies offer customized solutions for unique and dynamic enterprise needs. For instance, security-focused workloads can be kept in more private clouds, while more demanding workloads or those with varying levels of requirements can utilize the public cloud’s added flexibility.

As part of this mix, many organizations may choose to implement colocation — when privately-owned IT equipment is housed in a third-party data center — due to its benefits of offloading cost and complexity while maintaining powerful, secure IT capabilities. Colocation adds a number of benefits, especially as evolving demands make IT increasingly complicated, but for organizations looking to capitalize on these benefits, data centers become an important variable that should be chosen wisely.

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Identifying an Ideal Data Center for Hybrid Requirements

Choosing a colocation provider that will fit nicely within any hybrid framework involves many of the traditional colocation sourcing procedures. Location, physical security, carrier neutrality, and connectivity should be core considerations here, but above all, look for hands-on, high-touch service. Implementing a hybrid strategy is complex enough, a data center provider should make the process easier, simpler, and more streamlined with a dedicated expert team of engineers that can assist in every step of the way.

At Data Foundry we put customer service first and support that promise with comprehensive care, 24/7 support, world-class infrastructure, expert IT management, and upkeep services. Our experts and solutions help to enable your hybrid cloud storage strategy with both onsite storage and data center-to-data center connections to the cloud.

We’re more than just focused on helping businesses achieve their hybrid goals and digital transformation initiatives, we’re committed to accomplishing these objectives with added customer peace of mind. Our Texas 2 facility, a purpose-built, dually-fed data center that provides wholesale and retail colocation for a range of deployment sizes — is just one example from our location portfolio that keeps data center equipment safe and functional while offering ongoing care.

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