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Data center management across multiple locations is a complex endeavor. Juggling diverse hardware configurations, ensuring consistent security, addressing regulatory compliance, and troubleshooting technical issues are common challenges for an IT team.
These challenges become even more problematic when considering the additional difficulties across multiple time zones and languages. When addressed ineffectively, enterprises experience higher costs, extended downtimes, and burden on in-house resources.
Enterprises turn to colocation data centers as a strategic solution. The consolidation of IT infrastructure to centralized facilities decreases costs and required resources. We explore the concept of colocation, its benefits, and the capabilities of data center managed services in the article below.
What does colocation mean in a data center?
Colocation refers to using leased space within a data center environment. Enterprises retain ownership and control of the servers and hardware, but the colocation provider is responsible for the physical infrastructure.
The provider handles the power, cooling, security, and network connectivity, relieving these burdens for the business. Companies find these benefits increasingly attractive. According to Gartner, 4 of 5 enterprises aim to shut down legacy DCs by next year.
The colocation arrangement allows the company to leverage outsourced infrastructure without the capital expenditures and operational overhead of maintaining or rebuilding one’s facility to meet soaring scalability and efficiency demands.
What are the different types of colocation data centers?
Colocation data centers accommodate a diverse range of business requirements. The following types are common enterprise configurations:
Retail colocation: Provides individual cabinets or cages for smaller regional offices and branch locations.
Whole colocation: Offers dedicated, private suites appropriate for larger enterprises or data-intensive applications.
Modular colocation: The business scales infrastructure up or down for maximum flexibility.
How do colocation data centers reduce costs for businesses?
Multi-location enterprises face unique challenges for IT infrastructure management. To maintain on-site data centers, they must resort to costly practices that eat up monitoring, maintenance, and security resources.
The more dispersed these data center sites are, the more strain there is on internal teams. Colocation solves these issues by addressing scalability, management, and security concerns.
Reduce your square footage
On-site data centers require valuable real estate. Colocation frees up this space, allowing the enterprise to optimize office locations or downsize to more cost-effective spaces.
Reduced capital expenditure
A modern data center requires expensive construction, equipment, and maintenance. Colocation eliminates these upfront and long-term costs, directly improving a company’s bottom line.
Lower energy bills
Colocation leverages economies of scale and advanced cooling technologies that on-site data centers can’t afford. When enterprises take advantage of these features, there are direct correlations between lower energy costs and reduced environmental impacts.
What are the benefits of data center managed services?
Colocation addresses multiple infrastructure and budget challenges but requires specific expertise and extraneous resources that many enterprises lack. Managed service providers (MSPs) give businesses access to a team of experts dedicated to managing the day-to-day responsibilities and ongoing maintenance of colocated infrastructure.
The multi-layered service approach from MSPs creates a safety net for enterprises. Even brief outages create cascading effects for multi-location companies. Reliability is an invaluable asset for avoiding financial loss.
Data center redundancy prevents costly downtime
MSPs offer 24/7 monitoring of the servers and networks so potential issues are identified and dealt with before they escalate. Colocation providers often deploy 2N+1 power architectures to deliver twice the required power capacity plus one additional for backup.
Combining this redundancy with battery backup and diesel generators ensures uninterrupted power to any equipment. Multiple network connections, diverse routing paths, and failover mechanisms protect data from disruption—even if a primary connection fails.
Many colocation providers offer service level agreements (SLAs) with 100 percent guaranteed uptime. Enterprises then have confidence in critical systems backed by financial guarantees in the event of service interruptions.
Security and compliance avoid expensive fixes and fees
Data security and regulatory compliance complexities place significant risk on the business. Managed service providers have the expertise to implement robust security measures, conduct audits, and ensure adherence to industry standards.
MSPs protect enterprise data, mitigating the effect of costly breaches and the associated fines.
Ongoing support reduces the burden on senior staff
Managed services encompass a range of support activities, from server monitoring and maintenance to patch management and troubleshooting. These responsibilities are offloaded from an in-house staff, which lets them attend to more impactful projects that drive business growth.
Reducing scalability bottlenecks ensures rapid growth
Managed services enable the business to scale colocated infrastructure, adding or removing resources as required. When handled in-house, scaling creates lengthy procurement cycles and costly hardware upgrades.
A third-party connectivity expert expands and evolves alongside an enterprise’s IT needs without running into the limitations an internal team would face.
Conclusion
Colocation data centers provide a compelling value proposition for multi-location enterprises. It gives enterprises the best of both worlds—keeping ownership of hardware and software while releasing the responsibility of maintaining the infrastructure.
Streamlining enterprise connectivity eliminates capital expenditures, reduces energy costs, and creates long-term savings. The business removes undue burdens of maintenance, scalability, and security issues from in-house teams by utilizing the talents of a managed services provider.
A colocation partner like Advantage professionally manages these facilities and their data while achieving minimal operational costs.
Contact the connectivity experts at Advantage to learn how to tailor a colocation and managed services solution that meets your enterprise’s needs.