AlexWe’re not advocating renting data center space is some sort of remnant model of the past, if it works for you, great. However, take this time to contemplate on how you are running your business and what you’d like to improve.
When was the last time you had to buy new hardware because one of your servers got fried or you had to replace a cooling tower? Ask just about anyone how painstakingly arduous the process for replacing them can take and don’t even get us started on licensing.
Many businesses can end up with substantial downtime trying to configure all that hardware, licensing, acquiring approval, distribution fees, regulation compliance, onboard setup, et cetera. It can be a real time-waster and a total hassle, but the worst case scenario is that it’s your primary reason for why your business is facing downtime.
In a survey of small business owners, “65% estimated they would only lose $500 if their company's network went down for a day.” Those small business owners surveyed also said:
- 20% have a major IT accident resulting in downtime every five years.
- 40% of these businesses will close for good after a major disaster.
- 87% believe they are immune to a catastrophic IT disaster.
Ordering a server and setting it up the day it's delivered is honestly quite the feat and if you have an IT staff capable of doing all that in-house, they are most certainly keepers and kudos to them.
But when you don’t have that all-star squad of handy-dandy IT personnel that can do all that, this is when cloud service shines.
On the bright side, when you have to purchase capacity from data centers, you can just allocate how much of that data you want or which applications you need most and it should be ready for you to access in mere hours; hours needed for your business to function and to steer clear of that dreaded 40% pool of businesses that never made it out.
Colocation can help to release some of the burden or tenuous responsibilities from your hard-working shoulders and alleviate some of those IT stresses. They make it so that you can maintain much higher operational performances for longer periods of time (higher availability), load balancing (faster latency and faster bandwidth optimization), native backups (protection for your data and ease of retrieving it), disaster recovery, the list goes on and on. Plus the fact that most data center services are fully scalable and customizable to your unique needs and budget, it’s practically a call-to-action for why your business should have already looked into utilizing what kind of IaaS or PaaS services that can help eliminate your current IT woes.
Bottom line: Colocation has short-term perks, but cloud adoption is the long-term vision.
Ask yourself what kind of processing, online storage, backup protection, or even personal needs your business would benefit from instead of keeping them locked in-house. Maybe you don't need to push most of your applications into an online storage or at a separate site all at once, just the most valuable and mission-critical ones that might need redundancies in check in case anything were to happen.
