Colocation is not a new concept but given the fact that up to 58% of businesses still elect to keep their IT on-premises, it might be time to chat about what colocation can accomplish for businesses looking to optimize their IT strategy and give their employees a few more hours back in their days.
It’s a good idea to periodically refocus on why organizations consider colocation solutions. In a world where IT gets flashier every day, going back to basics can hold huge value for your organization. Colocation can act as a strong foundation to support whatever mission-critical platforms you intend to run, keeping your employees and customers happy and loyal.
How does Colocation Work?
Most companies are not in the business of owning and operating data centers, so they leverage a colocation facility to host their company’s critical infrastructure. Colocation is a highly secure data center facility where equipment, space, physical security, connectivity, and bandwidth are available for purchase to businesses.
Colocation hosting can improve uptime, free up capital costs and help exceed customer expectations for service. Colocation can take your existing infrastructure and move it from your in-office IT closet or on-premises environment to a data center purpose built to support and protect mission-critical IT assets. Using colocation hosting allows organizations to focus exclusively on managing their own operations with more scalable IT costs, leading to a more predictable capital spend.
What Makes Companies Choose Colocation?
After years or even decades of frustrating IT management and stressful rapidly-evolving compliance requirements, many organizations are ditching on-premises data centers or IT rooms in favor of colocation facilities. Here are some common factors we see over and over when working with organizations who are considering moves toward colocation facilities.
1.Uptime
We all know downtime can quickly kill a business. Your colocation provider’s redundant network guarantees your network is always on and your applications are always up. Redundancy might sound like a given, but there are levels of redundancy that serve businesses better than others. Solid data centers have redundancy built into the network offerings and power.
When looking for a colocation provider, look for not only redundancy within the data center but also the ability to circumnavigate carrier hotels in order to add an extra layer of reliability to your IT. This protects you from carrier hotel disasters, such as natural disasters and power outages. A data center with a wide geographic reach and private paths around carrier hotels can ensure that your internet is always on, no matter what.
2. Cost
Colocation’s return on investment is a huge driver to adoption. At the end of the day, your organization exists to do more than build, maintain, update and operate its IT infrastructure, so why would this be something that takes up a large portion of your capital spend?
Organizations are often attracted by the idea of owning and operating their own data center or IT room. When you really look at the numbers, most organizations realize on-premises IT simply does not make sense. Colocation providers can provide everything your organization needs for a scalable, reliable solution, with lower latency and at a more reasonable price.
3. Hardware Lifecycle
Typical depreciation of your IT equipment can fall in a range of anywhere from 3-10 years. While many companies consider their IT to be a great long-term investment, they run into issues when the ever-changing technology landscape or unexpected business needs (like moving a workforce entirely remote) can cause the requirements of their hardware to become outdated in as little as twelve months.
Hardware can put many companies in a Catch-22. Do they constantly spend extra capital on updating their hardware or do they run on outdated hardware, which could cost them significant money in lost customer sales? A strong colocation provider can give your hardware the scalability and flexibility to update as needed – allowing you to get the most from your IT investment.
4. Inherited Compliance
Whether your organization faces stringent regulatory requirements or has added pressure to support highly-regulated customers, compliance can be a huge challenge for your organization. Many data centers boast compliance certifications, which is great, but what you’re really looking for is inherited compliance controls. Many leaders in organizations lose significant time out of their weeks by working to meet compliance requirements like filling out reports, managing audit preparation and more. This can feel both frustrating and inefficient.
If you have a colocation provider with inheritable compliance controls, they can lift a massive amount of burden off your team members by handling the IT infrastructure portion of compliance reporting. The more you offload to a colocation provide, the less liability you have for your industry’s compliance regulations—and the compliance regulations your customers care about.
5. Control
Many IT teams are hesitant to put their trust in a colocation provider because they are worried about losing control of their environment. Colocation gives you the power to focus on the IT elements that you really care about and directly impact the revenue you generate.
For example: if a bank’s IT team is spending the majority of its time maintaining the compliance and durability of its infrastructure, that doesn’t leave them much time to work on developing an innovative remote banking app that they’d need to stack up against the competition, or even simply responding to customer service requests. By moving your IT to a data center, you are able to offload many of those drains on time and resources so you can focus on maintaining control where it matters.
LightEdge Can Customize Your Colocation Experience
At LightEdge, we know every organization is unique and has its industry compliance regulations to contend with as well as its own standard of care for its customers and employees. Colocation has the potential to give your team valuable time back in their days so your organization can keep running toward what really matters: your goals and objectives for growth.
If any of this resonated with you and you’re ready to jump into the world of colocation, feel free to give us a call today. Our experts are standing by and are ready to answer your most burning colocation questions. Let’s work together to address the IT concerns that keep you up at night.
