Colocation data centers can’t fix every issue that your business faces. They can, however, provide protection and improved server uptime for mission-critical assets better than on-premises solutions or public data centers.
As Gartner stated in its research, “Colocation is often used as a replacement for traditional data centers, because it offers higher availability, reliability, certified building tier levels, energy efficiency, dedicated facilities management and the ability to scale.”
COST
What will colocation cost? Companies don’t want to pay more.
No matter the benefits of the service or product, any improvement is more difficult to justify if you’re paying more for it. It’s human nature to want things that are better, quicker, and less expensive. Despite the reality of old axioms that say you can’t have it all, you can get pretty close with a good colo data center.
To logically figure out if you would pay more by migrating to a colo data center, you first need to tally up all the costs related to your current data center. Detailing the energy bill, water bill, personnel costs, security costs, outside vendor support costs, and rent will get you closer to comparing your whole TCO with a colo data center that rolls all of the above into one monthly recurring fee. That would be a true “apples to apples” comparison. .
Even if you conclude that colo would save money over on-prem, you may be thinking, “What about the cloud? Isn’t that cheaper than colo data centers?” Many companies have found the answer is, “No!” Due to variations in bandwidth usage, cloud deployments can hit you with huge surprise bills, whereas colo data center pricing is straightforward and predictable.
Have you considered migrating some IT workload to the cloud, perhaps for computations, and using a colo data center for storage needs? We’ve heard that some businesses have found that model to be a great financial fit.
Simply put, a good colo data center provider can provide you with economies of scale that you can’t find elsewhere. If a provider you’re considering cannot make you feel comfortable about what you’re paying and what you’re getting, keep looking, and you will find one that can.
COMPLEXITY
There are a lot of moving parts (literally and figuratively) in a data center move.
Scheduling all the disconnecting, packing, shipping, receiving, configuring, and reconnecting can make people fearful of so many ways things could go wrong.
This should be where an experienced colocation data center really shines. If they have an expert fit-out and deployment services team to handle your move, they will save you time and money. By taking deployment risk, planning, and execution off your plate, you save your internal resources for other projects.
And don’t worry, you would still have clear visibility into the minutiae of the move, as your packages go through a highly visible and detailed chain of custody. You would always know exactly where everything is.
A good colo operator should be able to coordinate and assist in your move while providing the level of detail you prefer. They should be able to take on all or part a project, utilizing vendors of your choosing or providing recommendations from their ecosystem of best of breed partners.
By managing the process from beginning to end, a dedicated colo partner can deliver your new deployment to your specifications, on your schedule, and at your price point.
CONTROL
Business owners have huge responsibilities and don’t want to give up control.
If you are operating your company’s on-premise data center, then you are used to seeing, controlling, checking, and fixing everything.
Well, you’re not giving that up.
Even after migrating to a colocation data center, you would still have the same amount of control over all the technical aspects of your network performance that you had at your on-premise data center.
Colo data centers do not manage applications. You still need to do that. Colo data centers do manage connectivity and hardware, which might be nice to take off your shoulders.
One big thing would change: you would have command of a more versatile, more available team that can handle your requests 24/7/365. Your IT team would be expanded to include certified experts available from providers such as Silverback (services called “Remote Hands” in the data center industry) or through the colocation facility who are ready to help swap out equipment, trouble-shoot to resolve performance issues, receive and unpack shipments, or check on anything else you need all around the data center – every day. This model results in better economic value, as these Remote Hands resources shared across multiple occupants of the facility.
Enterprises – just like yours – are seeing that there is so much to gain and so little to lose by migrating to a colocation facility. This is why prestigious analyst firms like Gartner are predicting that 80% of enterprises will close their traditional data centers by 2025.
Despite these concerns, you’ll find that colocation data centers offer many benefits and are worth evaluating.
