Organizations have never had more choices in how they architect their data centers. You can maintain your servers on your premises,  use the public cloud or you can create private clouds. Additionally, you can use a hybrid cloud colocation, mixing services in the cloud with services housed in your data center. Or you can house your servers in a colocation facility and connect to the cloud from there. This creates a hybrid environment that has great benefits.

Location, Location, Colocation

For more organizations, colocation is becoming the centerpiece of their hybrid IT strategy. Colocation takes advantage of the benefits of owning your hardware while using the colocation facilities' power, cooling and network infrastructure for connection to the cloud.

The advantages you gain include:

Physical security. Using a colocation facility eliminates the need for companies to maintain a separate, secure area on their premises to house physical hardware. Colocation facilities protect your organization by providing a building with multiple layers of security controls and monitoring. Inside the facilities, most colocation centers provide levels of security ranging from open racks to private locked rooms.

Compliance. Although colocation facilities support multiple tenants, unlike cloud providers, every tenant runs on its own hardware. This makes it possible to meet compliance requirements in industries like finance that require single-tenant environments. The applications run on your secure servers and can access cloud applications through secure, private connections.

Free space. Maintaining your data center on-premises means allocating space to equipment; this physical space also needs to include spare capacity to allow room for future growth. The cost of that unused space is significant. By making use of a colocation site, companies only pay for the room they need now and can add rack space within the center as needed later.

Lower cost. Using colocation can be cheaper than maintaining your data center. The costs for power and environmental controls are built into your contract. You need a smaller support staff than in your data center because the colocation site is responsible for some services you provide for yourself, such as networking support.

Redundancy. Colocation facilities are built with network and power capacity to support many tenants; they have more capacity than you would typically build into your data center and also have redundant systems to ensure uninterrupted service. Many providers have multiple locations, letting you more easily meet business continuity and disaster recovery concerns.

Control. With cloud environments, you necessarily surrender control over your environment to the cloud provider. You may share a machine with other clients and you don’t have control over
scheduled upgrades. In colocation, the servers are yours alone.

Using a Colocation Facility

Perhaps the greatest benefit of colocation is that you can also gain access to the service provider’s cloud expertise and management capabilities. OneNeck uses our more than 20 years of experience to offer our customers hybrid IT solutions that satisfy the security, compliance and reliability demands of their mission-critical applications and data.