Data center colocation provides your business with peace of mind that can’t be attained without a significant investment in data center infrastructure. With this in mind, let’s examine these 12 benefits of using a colocation data center.

1) Location

In real estate, you’ll often hear agents say that the most important thing is “Location, location, location.” When you choose a colo provider, location will be of the utmost importance.

If you are running your main production servers from a colo site, you’ll want to ensure that you have the lowest ping time possible. This is achieved by selecting a data center that is physically close to your main headquarters. Luckily, colo data centers are strategically placed in geographic areas that will provide your business with low ping times and robust bandwidth.

2) Buy Exactly What You Need for your Colocation

One of the big advantages of a colo hosting plan is that you can buy exactly what you need. If you only require a 10Mbps circuit for your servers, you can select this option when buying your plan.

If your business requires a faster uplink, your colo provider can certainly provide a bigger pipe for more bandwidth. Colo hosting plans let you buy exactly what you need and if you need more space, bandwidth or power, getting more resources is just a phone call or email away.

3) Remote Hands for Colocation

One of the biggest concerns about data center colocation is what to do when you need to perform a physical upgrade or a physical hardware swap. With Remote Hands, Certified NOC engineers are available to perform any task that your business might require in terms of a hard reset of a server, a memory upgrade, a hard drive upgrade, etc.

4) Rack and Stack Services

If you are starting your first data center colocation project, many businesses may not be aware that they can get “Rack and Stack” services as part of their agreement.

This simply means that you can preconfigure your network security devices with your pre-assigned ranges of public IPs. Next, you’ll provide the power and network cabling along with explicit instructions on how to plug in the devices.

This allows your servers to be up and running in no time. Your IT employees aren’t even required to visit the data center for the initial install.

5) 99.99% Network Availability

Most data centers have redundant dark fibers running into the facilities that are owned and operated by a wide array of telecommunications carriers.

This strategy should help businesses feel confident about selecting a data center colo partner because if one network backbone fails, the colocation data center provider can instantly failover onto another provider without any noticeable downtime.

6) Industry Recognized Certifications

When you select a data center colocation plan, your business can rest assured knowing that the facility you select has industry recognized certifications such as SOC, SSAE, and ISO. These certifications are earned through strict adherence to internationally recognized standards that ensure the integrity and physical security of your data.

7) Colocation Corporate Compliance

Many organizations must meet PCI, HIPAA and other complex corporate compliance standards. When you start researching data center colocation, you’ll find that many data centers have these corporate compliance measures baked into their everyday practices.

This gives your business peace of mind about the internal processes used by the colo facility that you choose.

8) Colocation Physical Security

How would you feel if someone walked right into your datacenter, unracked your servers and walked right out with your data in hand?

You might feel a little sick to your stomach just playing this scenario out in your mind. With a data center colocation plan, you can rest assured that uniformed security is always monitoring all physical ingress and egress points of entry.

Every data center visitor must present a non-expired state-issued ID before gaining access to the facility. Once a person has gained access, their every move is monitored using CCTV cameras.

9) Environmentally Friendly Colocation

Did you know that data centers are more environmentally friendly than ever? Many data centers are strategically placed near utility companies that have implemented wind, solar, hydroelectricity, and other renewable energy sources.

Other data centers have the advantage of being able to use free cooling methods. This reduces the carbon footprint of your colo data center while simultaneously passing on the cost savings to your company.

10) Budget Compatible

Getting data center space for your business is probably less expensive than you think. Go ahead and do the math. How much would it cost your organization to build out raised floor space, bring in premium bandwidth, install racks and cages alongside an enterprise HVAC unit?

11) Expandable, On-Demand

Data center space is offered on an economy of scale model. When you buy more space, the data center is able to offer you a better deal. Best of all, you can build as you go and continue to add more rack space as your workloads continue to grow.

Your workloads do not need to be in the same racks in order to operate properly. Your business just needs to have the networking know-how in order to make your workloads work in synchronicity.

12) Perfect for Disaster Recovery

If you aren’t comfortable using a server colocation plan for your organization’s production workloads, you might want to start your colocation journey by using a colo data center as a disaster recovery solution.

This allows you to “Flip the switch” when your business is faced with a service impacting outage.

Once you become comfortable using a colocation data center for your disaster recovery plan, you can begin to think about implementing colo for your production workloads.

This is a great alternative to cloud solutions and best of all, you control everything from the server hardware to the replication software that you use to create your colo hosted disaster recovery plan. Contact us today to learn more about what Wowrack can do for you!

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The Advantages of Data Center Colocation

Inking a colocation agreement can provide your business with a plethora of benefits. The immediate benefits of data center colo include:

• 99.99% Network Availability
• Redundant Power Sources
• Facilities are Monitored by Security Staff

These three benefits alone can help justify the move to colocation services. Many organizations will struggle with meeting these requirements when building out a data center onsite, thus making an offsite data center an attractive option.

Business Advantages Gained by Data Center Colocation

The decision on where to host your IT infrastructure can transform your business. For example, if you host your infrastructure onsite, your organization must provide redundant network circuits, redundant power sources and a robust environmental control system to keep your server room cool and the humidity at an acceptable level.

When you think about the overhead your business must expend in efforts to achieve these tasks alone, making the move to an offsite data center can begin to sound like an easy decision. Some organizations face strict compliance standards that force them to implement advanced environmental monitoring. For example, many onsite data centers are required to have standing water sensors, door alarms, and fire suppression systems. Many businesses must also pay to have these systems serviced and certified on a regular basis. Some industries require that onsite datacenters meet a strict set of compliance guidelines such as HIPAA or PCI-DSS.

When organizations offload these tasks to a data center colocation provider, the main focus of the organization will shift back to providing value to the client, not building, maintaining and deploying data center infrastructure.

Data Center Colocation: A Turn-Key Solution?

Many organizations have adhered to the risk-averse methodology of storing data onsite rather than using a data center colocation provider. Unfortunately, building out a small onsite data center can be costly and labor intensive. Organizations face significant infrastructure costs when maintaining onsite data centers. This is why data center colocation continues to be a popular solution for businesses wanting to expand their IT infrastructure. Colocation is a turnkey solution because businesses can buy as much cabinet space, bandwidth and power resources that they need. Best of all, unlike a cloud solution, your business owns the hardware. This can be advantageous because if your organization ever needs to physically upgrade or replace the machine, your business can elect to pay a “Remote Hands” technician at the data center to perform the task. Alternatively, you can simply send your own technicians to the data center to recoup or service the equipment. Otherwise, you can always elect to have the equipment shipped to your office. The bottom line is that your business owns all the equipment that it puts in the data center.

Robust Network Connectivity

If you’ve ever performed a traceroute command to one of your favorite websites, you’ll likely see your packets travel through a network of telecom providers that are strategically located in large data center facilities all throughout the world. When you host your infrastructure within these facilities, your websites and your line of business applications will likely have a much shorter path to travel thus making your services more accessible and more reliable. Alternatively, data center colo providers often have dozens of telecom providers that run dark fiber into these facilities giving businesses the advantage of being able to rely on the data center’s network of redundant circuits. This is one of the ways colo providers are able to offer 99.99% network availability uptime guarantees.

Fun fact: The Ponemon Institute says that data center downtime costs the average company $9,000 per minute.

Transforming Businesses with Colo Services

Information technology should help you do business, not be the focus of your business. Managed colocation services are becoming a more popular solution for businesses because the agreement provides many of the guarantees a business would gain from onboarding additional IT talent for a fraction of the cost. This allows businesses to focus their resources on pursuing leads and making sales versus managing servers, switches and IT infrastructure. When you collocate your IT resources, you can begin to craft a more holistic approach to the way you deploy services to your end users.

For example, do you wish to implement a “Work from Home” or “Bring Your Own Device” policy? Hosting your IT infrastructure in a public facing data center could provide your end users with a much more reliable experience. Building out your infrastructure is a simple and predictable way to help deploy your infrastructure. If you only need half a cabinet, you can simply ink an agreement for 20Us of rack space. If you need more, you can simply request a new contract and connect your colo deployments using a route-based VPN with your firewall or network security devices.

How do you know if colo services are right for your business? Just crunch the numbers to see if they make sense for what your business is trying to accomplish. Colocation services can be utilized in a number of different manners including production infrastructure hosting, web application hosting or disaster recovery deployments. When you buy a contract for a colocated data center, you essentially have a blank canvas. The big advantage is that businesses no longer need to make the capital investment in building out their own data centers since the science of operating data centers has been largely solved by data center colo providers.

Can data center colo provide a win for your business? Find out more on our Data Center Colocation page.

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