Colocation &
Outsourcing
Choose Wisely
Five things to consider when choosing the right colocation partner,
according to Darren Watkins, managing director of Virtus Data Centres.
A
few years ago, you may
have heard it said that
colocation is dead,
and that cheap cloud
computing would take
its place. But it is clear today that
colocation is not going anywhere.
In fact, in the face of industry
scepticism, CBRE reported that
2016 was another record year
for leased data centre capacity
both in Europe and the US, with
predictions of growth thanks to
ongoing digital disruption and
the proliferation of business
ecosystems, the leveraging of AI/
28 | September 2017
machine learning and the power
of cloud.
All of this means that the issues
today’s IT leaders face are almost
always complex in nature. To
keep pace with the speed of doing
business, organisations are having
to continually reinvent themselves,
and consequently their supporting
digital infrastructure. The result
is that IT directors and CIOs have
sprawling environments to manage.
This is where colocation comes
into its own. It is designed to have
maximum flexibility with total
transparency and solves some of
the most frustrating problems
faced by IT departments, but
without introducing new problems.
It requires the same skills needed
to run servers in-house but the
provider takes full responsibility for
the physical environment i.e. the
state of the network cables, power
availability, physical security and
even the level of cleanliness are
somebody else’s problem.
Here are the top five things
to consider when choosing a
colocation partner: Location,
security, connectivity, flexibility
and Total Cost of Service.