What is Colocation?
How much IT equipment does your business require to run? Do the costs of ownership and maintenance put a strain on your budget? Does IT equipment put a limit on how much you can grow?
According to IDC research, the relative performance of IT assets like servers declines rapidly after year 3, down to 59% of capacity by year 7. Additionally, by their 5th year, the expenses of maintaining and supporting a server increase by approximately 148%!
Not only are these servers costly to replace, but your application/network performance and ability to innovate rely heavily on having sufficient computing power. An ageing on-site IT infrastructure could become your biggest roadblock to success.
Building an IT network with the same specifications as enterprise data centres would be impossible for most SMEs. This is perhaps the most significant benefit of colocation: the ability to host your IT environment in state-of-the-art data centres for a fraction of the cost and up-front investments. Data centre colocation is an excellent solution for small and mid-scale businesses.
What is Colocation?
Colocation is a cloud hosting service of locating your hardware in someone else’s data centre.
You licence or rent space in a third-party data centre and move your hardware there, taking advantage of the physical building, security, power supply and monitoring.
Many businesses could benefit from using data centre colocation services. With connectivity costs so low, and remote management the norm, it may not be in your best interests to build expensive on-premise data centres.
Are you in the early stages of deciding how or what hardware to move from your on-premises data centre? Here are some of the benefits that colocation could offer you to achieve digital transformation.
1. Preserving business continuity
Colocation offers built-in layers of redundancy to protect your hardware from downtime or cyber-attack. With secure network connections using leading IT security tools, your racks and therefore your network will be protected, highly-available and easy-to-access.
2. Reduce CAPEX spending
This is a huge benefit of hosting your infrastructure in an MSP’s data centre. Save on costs and scale in and out and only pay for the space and compute power you use. You can eliminate the up-front costs of building and maintaining your own facility, levelling the playing field so that your SMB can provide enterprise-grade availability for your business and clients.
3. Achieve a hybrid strategy
Colocation is one of the building blocks in a modern hybrid IT strategy. Your organisation may also use a public cloud service, or managed IT support or hosting with a MSP. Colocation is the ideal choice for servers and data that may not be cloud-ready for suitable to live in the cloud.
If you’re exploring the different options, our infrastructure architects can offer you agnostic, strategic advice on the best location for your hardware or data sets.
4. Enhanced physical security, controlled climate & reliable power supply
These built-in features offer varying levels of redundancy and monitoring for your infrastructure. Our data centre network has multiple diverse network connections spread across six UK locations, including space in world-class DCs such as Vantage.
Not only do they offer climate control, redundant power supplys and physical security monitoring, they offer critical security credentials like ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (Information Security Management).
5. Reduce the strain on your IT team
if you choose, our data centre maintenance team can take care of many upkeep and maintenance tasks for you, giving your IT team more flexibility and time to work on new initiatives. You can move your hardware right into a fully-compliant data centre to meet relevant industry standards. However, you still retain full control over you colocated hardware, with the ability to visit and change any configurations whenever needed.
With SysGroup, you gain the best of both worlds
We have established a network of world-class data centres for colocation alongside our offering of cloud hosting and a range of fully-managed IT services.
Our agnostic approach allows you to evaluate the benefits of each solution or service and how they align to help you achieve your goals.
