thriveOrganizations of any size can benefit from purchasing a colocation data center plan. When you start to factor in the costs of building an on-premises data center versus leasing server colocation space, the choice between the two options becomes crystal clear.
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!
