As we hit the ground running in 2021, we reflect back on what we learned in 2020. Last year presented numerous challenges that greatly impacted the IT world, predominantly shaped by the pandemic. With more and more people required to work from home, supporting a distributed remote workforce was top of mind for everyone and will remain so for much of the new year. This is why ensuring your business is set up for success to support a remote workforce in 2021 is at the top of our IT trends watchlist for 2021.
Remote Work: network capabilities and colocation outsourcing
Across the world, remote work and remote education continues to accelerate, enabled by digital communications, further driving IT transformation. In order to support such a vastly distributed workforce, companies must ensure they have a solid data center or colocation solution fortified with network capabilities that can support workers, no matter where they are. Remote workers rely on home internet services to access corporate data and to support customers when needed. These solutions are typically provided by traditional telephony providers or cable operators, oftentimes with limitations on speed and little control of performance by users. In order to support these varied data connections, companies must have a way to ensure access to their corporate data is both secure and reliable. Understanding these challenges is key to selecting a data center and colocation partner that can work with you to ensure that the security, reliability and performance of your IT infrastructure is optimized for your workforce and business requirements alike.
Hybrid Cloud Strategies: supercharging IT infrastructure
Giving your remote workers the tools to compete effectively requires a different approach to traditional IT infrastructure – capable of supporting non-traditional work environments. Utilizing a hybrid IT strategy demands an architecture that harnesses storage or computing resources across a combination of public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise infrastructure. This allows you to have the best cloud capabilities with a private network for a more secure digital business. A colocation partner can support hybrid infrastructure models with specialized service offerings, like private cloud on-ramps, making it possible for companies to have secure and seamless connections from their data center to their cloud provider.
Beyond supporting a hybrid IT strategy, the right colocation partner provides your company with more choices of network providers and diverse points of presence. By having a more distributed network architecture you can support an array of end or edge points. All of this is critical to enable access, further driving digital transformation.
And a further benefit to colocation is that it can alleviate a lot of potential headaches: staffing, space, and an uninterrupted flow of power and cooling, regardless of weather conditions or other local issues. With the right partner, all of this comes with a commitment of service and support 24x7x365 days a year.
A Reliable Data Center: what should you be looking for in a colocation provider
When identifying a colocation provider, ensure they offer physical redundancy, direct access to cloud, content, and application providers, and can provide full monitoring capabilities to deliver the performance and security your company needs. A good partner, like Data Foundry, can help your business in a number of ways. By letting us know what pain points matter most to you, our team of data center, colocation, network, and security specialists can provide you with an optimal solution to ensure your business needs are met today, and supported through tomorrow.
Data Foundry’s colocation and data center capabilities provide customers with a variety of locations, network providers, access points, and more. To learn more about our data center capabilities, we invite you to a virtual tour of our Houston 2 data center here.
Familiar with Data Foundry’s Texas data centers and colocation solutions in Austin and Houston and want to get pricing for our services? Get a quick quote here, and let’s talk.