How To Create The Best Co-location Strategy For Your Business

By 2018 service providers will own a quarter of all IT assets installed in organizations' server rooms and closets, according to IDC report. The report also states that over the next two years, more than 60% of companies will stop managing most of their IT infrastructure, relying on advanced automation and qualified service partners to boost efficiency and directly tie datacenter spend to business value. 

As more and more companies are realizing the benefits of co-location, the time is right for those who are considering to make the move from on-premises to managed offsite facilities.

What Are The Reasons To Switch To Co-location

Businesses usually start considering co-location once they run into limitations with their in-house data centers, such as servers capacity, or other related issues. Whatever the technical issue may be, the good news is that co-location providers have them all resolved, as it is the core of their business.

There are numerous reasons to go with the co-location service, some of the most common ones are given below:

 1. Avoiding endless investments

Majority of companies that build their own data centers build them with their current needs in mind. Over time, as machine density increases and company’s needs grow, they end up with insufficient space in their data center that was costly to build and is costing even more to maintain.

 2. Making sure future capacity needs will be met

New virtualized servers are a great way of reducing the space usage while increasing the number of servers in use. However, traditional data centers are usually not designed to handle power and cooling requirements that come with the new virtualized servers.

 3. Multi-use buildings

Building a data center is a costly endeavour and it is not surprising that companies often use those facilities for other purposes as well, commonly office space. As the number of uses increase so do the strains on facility resources. On the other hand requirements of different business departments often clash, which can jeopardize daily operations.

Therefore, co-location provides companies with the ability to use their existing hardware and rent as many additional rack spaces as they need to stop them from making unnecessary compromises and investments.

Additional Challenges That Companies Can Resolve With Co-location Services

• Data Center Saturation. It is not uncommon for growing companies to run out of physical space and simply no longer have room to expand.

• Growing technology expenses. With businesses increasingly implementing cloud strategies, they require additional Internet bandwidth to access data, workflows, and applications, all of which result with increased expenses. With co-location service businesses can use the additional bandwidth provided to access their cloud resources.

• Assess business’ needs. You might ask how can the value of co-location within your business be identified? The best place to start is by assessing which applications utilize co-location's strengths to increase business value and improve customer experience. To effectively leverage benefits of colocation, companies need to have a clear understanding of what they want, need, and can afford.These goals have to be clearly set in order to prevent overspending.

• Location. With colocation, you are effectively building an extension of your office so choose the co-location facility that is near. True, you are getting a service from a provider but you are responsible for setting up and then maintaining hardware and software. Make sure that co-location facility is relatively close and accessible by your team. Keep in mind that it needs to be accessible overnight as well, in case of an emergency.

• Growing infrastructure. If you are satisfied with the way your current systems are working but do not have room to grow, then co-location can be your perfect solution. You can easily move existing systems to a co-located environment without affecting the existing process.

• Full customization. With co-location facility you no longer face constraints of your own data center, you can use any server, software, or storage configuration you like.

• Focus on your strengths and core competencies. Running your own data center demands expertise and resources, and wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on running your business than worrying about space, power, cooling and other technical issues that come with running a data center. With co-location your provider takes care of all those details and you can invest your time to growing your business. With co-location you can delegate a number of tasks to the data center's remote hands team. Provider will alert you when server is down or needs to be rebooted and you can place a call to the remote hands team and ask for assistance with rebooting the server and checking the status before making a long drive. With co-location service, companies can focus on growth and leverage the benefits provided by a co-location service.

• Focus on value not cost. When evaluating colocation plans it is important to focus on the overall value of a data center and not on service cost. Co-location service costs can vary, but before you make your decision make sure you fully understand what you are trying to accomplish with this service.

In conclusion

As companies find maintaining and updating their own data centers expensive, it is no surprise that co-location is growing globally. However, before switching to co-location you need to properly plan the move and assess your needs. When you find co-location facilities that have the right locations, consider the overall value of those data centers before making your final choice.

Experienced co-location providers such as Everdata can assist you in assessing your needs and provide you with options that best suit your current and future needs.