If you own or work for a small-to-medium sized business you know that you often wear many hats and perform tasks well outside of your official title. This is the reality for most organizations of this size and in a world where technology is constantly evolving, sometimes it seems impossible to keep up. Your systems need to be secure, reliable, and accessible. This isn’t always easy to achieve. I’m going to give you 4 reasons your organization should hire a colocation provider, but first, what the heck is colocation anyways?
It’s actually pretty simple. Instead of hosting your existing servers and other computer hardware on site, you can choose to house them in a colocation center. Typically, the process of hosting your own servers is not only expensive, but it also means that if your location is for some reason offline (internet outage, power outage, natural disaster etc.) your team or customers will not be able to access mission critical data.
Here are 4 advantages to collocating your IT infrastructure:
1. Ease of Setup
The act of collocating will save your organization a lot of time that would be spent on creating your own data center, allowing you to focus on the things that you do well. Data Centers employ a staff of experienced professionals that will help you get your infrastructure set up properly, as well as maintain it.
2. Security
Colocation providers are capable of providing a level of security that is often unattainable within your own organization due to the fact that they have technicians monitoring the network 24/7/365. They’ll be able to keep your website safe from DDOS and other attacks, as well as monitor performance and other variables. Most businesses these days rely on their websites to drive sales or traffic to physical stores and every hour lost due to an outage is the potential loss of revenue.
3. Reliability and Support
One of the most important things to consider when looking at a colocation provider is reliability. When it comes to data centers, reliability is measured in uptime. Simply put, uptime is the time during which the network and servers are up and running. There are many things that can cause downtime, including natural disasters that can knock out critical systems like internet connection and power. Any good data center will provide a level of redundancy that’s often not attainable when you host your servers in house. They’ll already have invested in battery backups and generators that are necessary to achieve redundancy.
Support and reliability go hand in hand because if you’re experiencing any issues on your end, the level of support you receive will be critical to maintaining your day to day business functions. Make sure your potential colocation provider has 24/7 tech support.
4. Cost
This is the big and probably most obvious reason to do anything in business. Building your own data center will be a massive cost, not to mention maintaining it and making sure you have the proper staff monitoring it. Collocating your existing servers is typically a much more cost effective strategy.
Ultimately, outsourcing your IT services will not only cut costs, but it will free your organization up to do what you do best, rather than focusing on back end tasks. If you’d like a quote on colocation and other managed IT Services from ColoCrossing, feel free to email sales at sales@colocrossing.com or request more info here.
