Thursday, 21 May 2015 Blog ehdf

Understanding How Colocation Helps Business Growth

Business data and applications are growing at an extremely high rate and the IT infrastructure required to accommodate and manage this data needs to grow at the same pace too. However, building your own data centre facility can be quite expensive! This has propelled businesses to house their servers at a co-location facility, which offers a secure data centre environment for servers and other IT infrastructure.

Today, businesses of all sizes are considering colocation for varied reasons – small businesses can get access to a high quality data centre facility without the capital investment, whereas medium to large sized enterprises can expand their infrastructure capacity without undertaking costly data center construction.

Benefits of co-location

1. Building your own data centre can be expensive! Besides huge capital expenses, it involves regular maintenance, upgrade and facilities management costs. However, when you opt for co-location, you convert CAPEX to OPEX with predictable monthly costs

2. By co-locating your IT infrastructure, you can be assured of best-in-class security which includes 24X7 monitoring, dedicated security staff, access & authentication systems, CCTV surveillance, etc.

3. Computing needs can shoot-up overnight, or drop drastically during lean periods. So rather than investing in a new data centre or expanding the existing data centre space, you can simply co-locate your IT assets at a services provider data centre at short notice.

4. Your business applications depend on 100% network reliability, which can be difficult and costly to maintain in an in-house data centre environment. With co-location, you are guaranteed network reliability and availability with maximum uptime due to redundant network connections.

5. Climate control in data centres can also be tricky and should be left to experts! Co-location providers keep your servers in climate-controlled data centers, with redundancy in cooling systems

6. Running a data centre involves high power usage. Often businesses are not able to manage power usage efficiently. The sustainable advantage provided by co-location providers with their technical knowhow guarantees reduction in power wastage and operating costs

In summary, co-location offers secure data centre, better connectivity, and redundant power and cooling to support critical businesses applications. It frees up your IT staff to focus on strategic business operations required for optimal business growth.

Top tips to choose a hosting provider to best meet your requirements

1. Analyze the hosting provider’s services portfolio, features of the services, flexibility in pricing and packages available

2. Evaluate the facility based on your company’s needs—size of your organization, nature of business/industry, nature of the application, availability requirements, security/compliance requirements, etc.

3. Choose a services provider who takes up the responsibility to watch over your systems 24/7, ensuring that they are running continuously

4. Know if a potential services provider offers 24/7 support

5. Ask them for testimonials, case studies and reference checks from clients they have done similar projects for