Let’s be honest: owning and operating a data center on-premises is probably not aligned with your core business. If you’re one of the nearly half of all organizations that still hosts its IT on-premises, you know it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s probably a drain on resources and manpower and you probably also find that hardware becomes obsolete or outdated quickly, sending the true cost of your infrastructure sky-high. It may be time to look at colocation.
At some point, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Is it really worth it?” When dealing with yet another piece of broken hardware or lying awake at night, worrying about your facility’s physical and cyber security. The simple answer is that it’s not worth it. The cost and headache of your on-premises infrastructure may not be doing your organization any favors—in fact, it may be actively working against your objectives for security, uptime and growth.
Here are a few benefits of colocation that will make the switch worthwhile. Take a look and see what resonates with you and schedule a call with our team of colocation experts if you have any questions.
1. Crush your costs
Remember all those costs in the intro? That’s not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to on-prem IT costs. Between the physical structure and the staff to maintain IT facilities, if you’re one of the nearly half of all organizations who still host their own IT, the true cost of your IT maintenance and hosting is likely much higher than you were initially led to believe.
While the up-front cost of a colocation facility may seem higher than your on-prem solutions, you are bundling everything together—your service, your maintenance and your security, which means you’ll likely get all the components you need to successfully manage your IT at a significantly reduced cost of doing it on your own.
2. Loyalty Increases When Uptime Does
With round-the-clock demands of both customers and staff, you can’t afford unexpected downtime. If you’re experiencing stretches of unexpected downtime, you’re practically guaranteeing your customers and maybe even your staff will seek another provider or employer. The lost time and lack of access to applications when your people need them loses you money in lost transactions and also lost productivity. Obviously, there are certain outages that can’t be predicted or mitigated in a single location like extreme weather, but it’s critical to take charge where you can.
Interconnected, redundant colocation facilities can drastically reduce the amount of downtime your organization experiences by automatically routing traffic around carrier hotels when they go dark or Mother Nature exacts her revenge. Opting for colocation gives you control of your uptime in a way on-premises IT often fails to do, allowing you to opt out of the nail-biters that are extreme weather, power outages, or even human error.
3. Everything’s up-to-date
We all know that hardware becomes outdated far faster than it depreciates. Many companies are investing in their hardware with their three-to-five-year forecast in mind. Very few of us have that kind of foresight and we can often end up investing in the wrong hardware, not enough of it, or even failing to think beyond the next six months, since the tech space changes so quickly.
With a trustworthy data center provider, you may have more flexible options to always have the best equipment for little-to-no additional capital spend. You no longer have to worry about your hardware breaking or power going out when you move your mission-critical IT to a data center because there will always be a team on hand to make sure your equipment is running in peak condition.
4. Colocation Offers Security like none other
Chances are your on-premises infrastructure has the same security as the rest of your building. Maybe you need a badge to access the room where you host all your servers, but in many organizations, that’s as sophisticated as it gets, which means if an employee drops their badge on the street, anyone who picks it up can access your IT.
When you tour a colocation facility, it can be easy to feel like you’re on the set of Get Smart. The security will likely blow whatever you have out of the water, with hand scans, mantraps and even face scans in some locations. It’s easy to see how much harder it would be for a malicious actor to enter the facility and wreak havoc on your mission-critical IT. Additionally, it can also help you manage who has access to your rack, cage or suite to mitigate human error by employees who shouldn’t have access either.
5. Keep Pace with Where You’re Going
Colocation and cloud are the way of the future. As IT needs become more complex and you need more space, bandwidth or even just another set of hands for support, you may have a hard time meeting those needs with on-prem infrastructure. Building out the initial server room can cost organizations $100,000 up front, plus maintenance and staffing. Any additional space will require another buildout.
With a reliable colocation provider scaling up and out, adding services or protections can happen in a matter of moments—and at a fair cost. Over the course of the pandemic, the shift to remote work meant that many organizations needed to ramp up their IT to manage a larger number of dispersed endpoints, and those already in colocation facilities had the advantage because they could easily scale up according to their own rate of growth.
LightEdge Colocation Gets You Back to What Matters
At the end of the day, when you choose to outsource your data center needs, you’re given the gift of time and resources. You have more time to complete activities that align with your core business goals and objectives. You’ve freed up your otherwise overextended IT team to provide more services that directly impact customers and revenue. At the end of the day, you get to return to what makes you get up in the morning.
LightEdge’s geographically-dispersed, interconnected data center facilities and teams of experts are waiting ready to host your most critical IT infrastructure so you can move forward with confidence. Ready to take the leap and migrate to a data center? Let’s chat this week to see how we can help get you there.
