The four major business advantages of colocation that will benefit companies in 2021

The four major business advantages of colocation that will benefit companies in 2021

The four primary business advantages of colocation that will benefit companies in 2021

It is exciting to grow your business, but many things can slow you down – and one of the most significant slowdowns is IT.

As you grow your business, the cost and resources that go into housing, managing, and maintaining your servers tend to increase. The budget and resources are there and could be re-invested in growth initiatives in an ideal world.

Being an expanding and successful business may entail a growing IT estate. It’s possible to reduce those costs and free your business to grow by following a straightforward strategy.

Colocation is an approach that can help an organization achieve its goals. In this post, we explore four ways it can help.

Precisely what is colocation?
Instead of installing your servers in your own space, colocation is where they are housed in a professional data center. Colocation involves paying an external provider to provide space, cooling, and server maintenance for your servers rather than doing all of this yourself.

High-speed connections between your premises and their data center allow you to access your servers and storage immediately.

All types of businesses benefit from colocation for the following reasons:

  1. Spend less on servers and invest more in growth
    The costs associated with on-site servers can be significant for growing businesses. On-site servers can require a high budget to ensure they are powered and kept at a steady temperature. This prevents investment in other key growth areas in your company.

There is evidence that powering and cooling a data center is a huge burden on businesses worldwide.

According to the International Data Center Association, data centers around the world consumed more electricity in 2015 than the UK combined.
Of global electricity, data centers use 3.0%

A single rack in a data center uses, on average, $120K worth of electricity in 10 years.

If you colocate your infrastructure in an external data center, you can avoid many of these costs and still have access to the IT resources you need.

  1. Find more space to house your growing team.
    You often have to find more space for your expanding team when your business expands. Even if you can find a suitable new location, searching for new premises can be costly and disruptive.

You can free up a room or floor that’s currently taking up space with your IT equipment by colocating. By moving your IT infrastructure offsite, you save the time and cost of locating and moving to new premises and benefit from additional cost savings.

  1. Always keep your applications running
    It is crucial that critical applications such as your website and core business software systems operate efficiently and at peak performance for your business. However, many things can happen in your server room to prevent this. Occasionally, power outages occur, UPS backups run out, servers slow down, and technicians need a day off.

Your servers are installed in a managed, professionally maintained environment when you colocate with a shared data center.

With a common objective of keeping infrastructure up and running, shared data centers can do many things individual businesses are unable to do:

Providing expert support and management 24/7/365 is handled by a team of engineers. You’re assured that your service won’t be interrupted by their backup generator. To ensure that data can be recovered in an emergency, they have additional backup sites.

  1. Make sure your business and data is secure and compliant
    All business owners are aware of the importance of data security, but staying on top of security threats and ensuring that your data is protected can significantly drain on time, budget, and resources. It can seem like you’re caught between a rock and a hard place, especially when there is a possibility of a security breach, fines, reputational damage, and business downtime.

A security breach at TalkTalk in 2015 cost the telecoms provider approximately £60M and affected 101,000 customers. With the impending General Data Protection Regulation of the EU and other new data handling regulations on the horizon, compliance has also become increasingly important.

With colocation, you can shift the burden of security and compliance to a shared service provider with expertise in data security – and avoid noncompliance or expensive data breaches.

Data centers that are part of shared services offer far more than just shifting responsibilities.

The building is protected by round-the-clock security.

A locking cabinet and an alarm ensure the safety of each rack.

Security and compliance with our top-of-the-line firewalls and encryption

Colocation’s real-world benefits

You don’t want IT to slow down business growth when you have ambition and opportunity. You can mitigate security risks, reduce costs, scale seamlessly, and improve uptime by relocating your infrastructure to a colocation provider.

Learn about the cost of colocation
There’s no need to worry about the cost of colocation when you can solve some of your toughest business challenges. Feel free to contact us if you have questions about colocation, how much it costs, or what it could do for your business.