5 Key Reasons to Justify Server Colocation Hosting

It is common for most of the companies to have an in house data center infrastructure. The facility offers confidence of data security, dedicated technical staff, and easy access to the infrastructure. However, as the organizations continue to grow and start accessing more and more applications of Internet, there is a concern about minimizing costs or implementation of compliance regulations.

This opens up new avenues to choose colocation as a right alternative to continue ownership of server hardware while outsourcing the basic infrastructure to manage the hosting related tasks. Before you finalize the decision to collocate your servers in another hosting facility, there are some concerns to be addressed.

Let us first look at the advantages of colocation. As the term implies, colocation is locating all server and associated equipment in a remote data center owned and operated by third party colocation hosting provider. Colocation facilitates storage of mission critical equipment at an environment that is highly secured, reliable, and scalable. Organizations can continue to expand and grow without having to duplicate IT specific infrastructure to cater to growing needs of data storage and web hosting.

Scalable and homogeneous infrastructure

Among all important attributes of colocation hosting, scalability features on top position because colocation hosting offers granular level scalability. Scalability also helps save costs by optimization of resource consumption without impacting resource availability.

It needs to be noted that colocation not only provides upward scalability but is also able to support downward scaling by implementation of periodic cycles to determine need for scaling upward or downward to increase or decrease capacities. These cycles can be established on hourly or daily basis.

Established providers of colocation services ensure that the server infrastructure is highly homogenous. This is achieved by ensuring uniform memory, capacity, and CPU speed across all individual nodes.

You need to confirm that the new servers that could be added to system conform to your requirements appropriate clock speeds and ability to handle appropriate part of traffic. In the absence of homogeneity users end up losing expensive hardware equipment.

It is recommended to find a colocation host that owns and operates data center infrastructure including cooling, power, and networking facilities, so that you will not face any issues on account of outages or any other glitches.  

Bandwidth and other benefits

A colocation host needs to purchase large volumes of bandwidth for supporting several customers’ web applications. This provides economy of scale and users are able to avail affordable bandwidth offerings. The cost of bandwidth would be significantly lower than on premise facility since it would be purchased for individual consumption.

Add to this, built-in redundancies for power and cooling facilities. It is a fact that it is not viable to arrange for high powered diesel generators at on-premise data center facilities.

Implementation of robust security and redundancy

Colocation facilities are usually located in areas that are less prone to natural catastrophes such as earth quakes or floods among others. Colocation centers implement fortress like security with round the clock presence of armed guards, well-constructed periphery walls, extensive and 24/7 CCTV monitoring, biometric access control measures, mantraps, and much more. The premises are well-equipped to deal with fire or other disasters.  

In addition to these facilities, colocation data centers provide redundant networks of fiber optics, backup generators, redundant HVAC facilities, and round the clock surveillance.

Managing data center is a highly specialized function that requires 24/7/365 involvement of engineering teams, security personnel, and administrative staff to ensure incessant uptime for enabling constant availability of business critical web applications of clients.

Freedom to pursue growth objectives

It has been established that even the most efficient IT teams are not able to devote sufficient time to fulfill strategic goals due to their involvement in mundane and non productive tasks related to maintenance of infrastructure such as database administration, configuration, and system updates just to name a few. Significant amount of time of IT teams is wasted in prevention of downtime instead of accomplishing growth objectives.  

Organizations often fail to rise to the occasion by exploiting challenges and benefits of new technologies while coping up with incremental demands of data and infrastructure workloads.

Unless such organizations choose to associate with a colocation provider for offloading their enterprise IT needs, these enterprises would be forced to incur huge capital expenditure to upgrade their in house IT resource.

Thanks to colocation hosting, organizations can find themselves in a better position to focus on growth objectives without having to worry about patching, updating, or ensuring uptime. Colocation is also considered to be a more financially viable solution that helps enterprises move from capital expenditure to operations expenditure model.

Regulatory requirements

Compliance and regulatory restrictions are set to become stricter in near future due to growing need of data security and integrity. Colocation hosting helps organizations ensure seamless compliance with variety of regulatory requirements including, HIPAA, NIST, FDA, and ISO to name a few. By availing colocation hosting, organizations are able to address compliance issues at no additional costs and efforts.