Part I – The Convergence of the Public Cloud and Colocation Delivers Next Level Integration

The IT Environment That Supports Your Business Is Your Digital Backbone 

In today’s world, technology is the backbone of business.  No matter the organization’s size, chances are it relies heavily on IT to stay competitive and thrive in a market where every business must be digital.

Enterprises use a wide range of tools to enhance their product and meet their customers’ evolving needs.  From collaborative suites to compliance-driven financial applications, these tools all require IT environments to leverage their operational resources.  It is incumbent upon businesses to find an optimal balance when leveraging the best technology available in a cost-effective manner that can scale with their business.

The IT environments that support your business solutions can be hosted in several places.  Businesses that wish to maintain control of their IT environment utilize either an on-premises solution or outsource their environment to a privately owned data center or a shared colocation facility.  Businesses also use the cloud, a physical data center owned by a cloud provider, to virtually host their customer data.

Cloud Versus Colocation Is No Longer An Either-Or Proposition

In the past, the question of cloud vs. colocation vs. on-prem fueled competitive debates about which IT environment solution was a better fit.  Yet, the tech world’s endless innovations mean the decades-old question is no longer an either-or proposition.

When it comes to addressing IT storage needs, the hybrid cloud, a combination of cloud IT environments and colocation data centers, is emerging as the preferred method.  When separate IT environments are seamlessly connected, the data stored in physical data centers are co-mingled with public cloud data centers to optimize each environment’s advantages.  The resulting blended or hybrid infrastructure is integrated to serve the best environment per application and the business as a whole.

Here at Element Critical, we would like to do a closer examination of the obstacles that face our customers and where they choose to place their enterprise deployments, whether that be the cloud, on-premise, or in a colocation environment.  In this series, we will cover the following topics:

• Part II – The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Cloud Solution
• Part III – The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Colocation Data Center Solution
• Part IV – Colocation and Direct Cloud Connectivity Fortifies Hybrid IT Architecture
• Part V – Application and Workload Use Cases for a Hybridized Infrastructure Model

The convergence delivers the next-level integration that enterprise businesses are looking for without having to host entirely in the cloud or a data center.  However, it requires a greater understanding of each environment’s strengths and weaknesses so businesses can better evaluate how a hybrid architecture and connected environments can be the ultimate business solution.

Next: The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Cloud Solution

Learn More About How Colocation Can Make Cloud Connection Most Efficient For Your Business

Pure colocation architectures or pure cloud solutions may work for some companies; it is important to remember that these IT infrastructure approaches are not incompatible.  Many companies find that their initial jump to the cloud or the immense amount of data they need to host requires cost-efficiency strategies.  Hybrid cloud architectures optimize based upon workloads rather than an either-or colocation or cloud solution.  Hybrid cloud and colocation models or multi-cloud solutions can provide companies with the best features of each platform when implemented in a robust data center environment with dedicated connections to all the cloud providers you need.

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