Taking Colocation to the next level

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The concept of Colocation is pretty well understood and there are Colo data centres all over the globe.

However, Colocation still requires businesses to have in-house IT expertise, or at least a trusted IT consultant, who can nip over to the data centre to handle any required changes and maintenance.

But IT guys can’t always be spared, or your business might not want to shell out on consultancy fees, especially for relatively minor hardware changes.

That’s why savvy data centre operators have taken Colocation to the next level by offering Managed Colocation which provides all the benefits of Colo without taking away any of the control or ownership.

 

So what is Managed Colocation?

Colocation is when your IT hardware is housed in a service provider’s facility, most commonly a data centre, removing the costs of operating and maintaining your
own on-premise server rooms.

The service provider is responsible for maintaining the facility, its environmental conditions, connectivity and security.

With Managed Colocation, the service provider takes this one step further by actively managing your hosted hardware for you, saving you the time, effort and cost of maintaining it yourself.

Depending on the level of management, they might take care of your operating system, applications and databases as well as the security and backups.

 

Why choose Managed Colo?

The benefits of Colocation have been discussed at length in previous blog posts, but what about the Managed element; what makes this so much more appealing to businesses like yours?

 

  • Full control
    Whether your other options are on-premise or cloud, managed Colo gives you the best balance of ownership, availability and control – as well as exactly how your server infrastructure is setup and configured.

 

  • High availability
    As well as the backup power sources you’d expect from your Colo provider, managed Colo providers should have enterprise-level, super-resilient connectivity, ensuring your data is always available to whoever needs it.

 

  • Global reach
    With managed Colo, you can have racks anywhere in the world, for resilience, to accommodate different markets or to meet different regulatory conditions.

 

  • Expertise on-tap
    As we’ve already said, straightforward Colo requires you to have access to a certain level of technical expertise, whether in-house or via consultants. With managed Colo, trained, experienced technicians will take care of whatever needs to be added, removed or reconfigured.

 

  • Remote management
    Providers are increasingly developing remote management tools, so you can access and control your systems and data from anywhere.

 

  • Time-efficient
    Certain data, or large volumes of data, may be difficult or time-consuming to migrate to the cloud, making managed Colo a more practical option and a more efficient one in terms of both time and cost.

 

Strategic fit

Ultimately, the decision to choose managed Colo will depend on your organisation’s unique circumstances, available resources, business strategy and growth potential.

And your decision will be subject to periodic reviews of all these factors as well as how well your chosen hosting solution is meeting your requirements.

But if managed Colo is right for you, you’ll be choosing a very practical, flexible and resilient method of hosting your hardware.

One that gives you the best of both worlds between full control and peace of mind.

 

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