Data center management is a highly complex and specialized job. It is hardly any wonder that there is growing trend of outsourcing data center management by more and more enterprise. This is primarily due to the fact that management of in house data center is an entirely different ball game than the core competencies of organizations.

Companies are more inclined to use colocation services offered by established service providers rather than spending huge efforts, time, and manpower resources managing in house data centers. Colocation of data center frees up important resources of organization including technical workforce, which can be utilized for more productive and innovative projects.

It is therefore not surprising that there has been a growing trend of acquiring colocation services for efficient data center operations by organizations. There are multiple reasons to justify use of colocation services instead of operating in house data centers.

Greater Cost Efficiency and Predictable Savings

There can be no two opinions regarding the expensive nature of in house data centers. Every enterprise can ensure huge cost savings if a common data center facility is designed to support hosting and storage requirement of several organizations. These economies of scale contribute significantly to the cost savings for companies that leverage colocation services offered by data center service providers.

Unlike commercially operated data centers it is difficult to achieve optimum level of redundancy at in house data centers. In addition to this, operating one’s own on premise data center involves a huge capital as well as operating expenditure. The costs are always inclined to mount in response to growing need for expansion or more manpower for managing the entire show.

It should be noted that for small and medium businesses an option of a colocation hosting is even more economical than adoption of cloud as a substitute to in house IT infrastructure. Stability of pricing is an essential requirement for many organizations and the same cannot be guaranteed in cloud environment. Unlike cloud services, colocation ensures predictability of operating costs.

Greater Uptime and Assured Availability

Thanks to number of measures including redundancies and greater bandwidth capacities, commercially operated colocation data centers are capable of ensuring near 100 percent network uptime for assured availability of web applications. This is not practically possible at in house data centers.

Established colocation data centers are supported by a fault tolerant network, reliable and redundant power supply, physical and networking security measures, HVAC systems, fire protection, access controls, round the clock performance monitoring tools, and responsive technical assistance. Thanks to redundant infrastructure, colocation providers are able to carry out maintenance and repair without impacting website availability.

Guaranteed Scalability

Expansion of an in house data center can be an overwhelming task. However colocation providers are equipped to provide additional resources as per requirement. Organizations need not be concerned about availability of resources to foster their growth plans. Colocation providers can easily add up to 100 racks without any hassles to accommodate growth objectives of client organizations.

Round the Clock Support

This is one of the important aspects of colocation provider services. Clients can look forward to highly responsive technical assistance that is provided on round the clock basis by dedicated technicians. Companies can be free from concerns about security patching, OS management, software upgrades, and other management tasks due to highly reliable technical support facilities offered by colocation providers.

Regulatory Compliance

All organizations that deal in processes associated with healthcare and insurance verticals need to observe stringent compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH. This is a highly sensitive area of data center management. It would be extremely difficult to achieve proficiency in this segment especially at in house data center environment. Colocation service providers offer assured compliance with regulatory restrictions.

Stringent Security Measures

Security in colocation data centers is a highly focused and rigidly implemented attribute. There many aspects of security that can only be compared with a heavily guarded fortress. You will find armed guards, biometric access, mantraps, CCTV monitoring, and other access control systems being implemented on round the clock basis.

Disaster Recovery Services

Major catastrophic events such as storms, tornadoes, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks can leave your data vulnerable to loss and damage forcing your company to suspend business operations indefinitely. Colocation services facilitate clients avail DRaaS and other data replication services. In fact, many organizations are colocating their servers with sole aim of securing their mission critical data.