Small, growing companies know that every penny counts, but so does planning for the possibility of future growth. That planning means gaining flexibility and being able to quickly scale your infrastructure as you gain clients and expand your business. Colocation is the perfect solution for companies, both small and large, to keep growing while maintaining a reasonable budget.
What is Colocation?
Chances are you have heard this buzz word from others in your industry or friends and family who are looking for solutions to grow their businesses in a cost-effective manner keeping safety in mind. Colocation is the practice of housing privately-owned servers and networking equipment in a third-party data center rather than in-house. Often the terminology such as: co-location, shared housing, or third-party data centers, are used to describe renting space in a shared facility with other businesses that also want to keep their data secure and well maintained in an off-site location.
The Advantages of Choosing Colocation
A newly released report projects that the worldwide data center colocation market will grow from its 2018 value of $13 billion to a whopping $90 billion-plus by 2024!
Why is Colocation Becoming so Popular?
Quite simply, colocation allows for flexibility, scalability, reliability, enhanced security, adherence to compliance rules, and 24/7 support. Renting of space from a data center provider to house your physical servers and network hardware has all of these things going for it and more. Here are a few of our favorite benefits of colocation services for our clients.
Increased Cost Savings
When faced with the choice of paying for IT services, infrastructure, and security for your technology, it is really a no brainer to share the costs. With colocation, your company can save money by splitting the cost of security, rental locations, and state-of-the-art services that small and medium sized companies often can not handle initially. Colocation allows for both initial savings on infrastructure investment as well as ongoing savings on sharing costs with other companies in similar situations.
Enhanced Security
Face it, it’s 2020 and anything that could go wrong, probably will go wrong. That means preventing security issues should be a top priority when safeguarding your company’s data. Choosing a third party vendor to house your servers and network hardware means that you have access to 24/7 support and security. By sharing the costs of security, state-of-the-art physical security and cyber security can be affordable, where alone it would be out of reach. The cyber security options can include next-generation firewalls, managed backups, and restoration, in case of a disaster. Physical security measures can include electronic access cards, 24/7 camera monitoring, personnel monitoring, physical-attack prevention, and fire detection & control.
Flexible Scalability
If your small or fledgling company has begun to outgrow your existing data solution, then colocation may be the answer to your problem. Colocation is an ideal solution for businesses that expect growth. The physical space can be upgraded to handle your current infrastructure and can also scale up as you grow. That means in a few months or years you can scale up again without having to reinvent your data location.
Redundancy and Reduced Downtime
One of the outstanding benefits of colocation is that there is an amazing uptime reliability track record at most facilities. A single outage can cost a company millions of dollars according to a report in Forbes. For example, the product delivery giant Amazon, lost $100 million in sales in one hour when it suffered downtime on Prime Day in 2018.Your company may not lose that amount but it should give you peace of mind to know that by colocating, your data is protected through diversified power sources, cooling features, and physical security features. If you are ready to consider the benefits of colocation services, talk to our team at Spectra Networks and find out it can work for your business.
