The Colocation Industry is Changing to Adapt to More Sophisticated Use Cases & Customers
Colocation has always offered businesses an ideal environment to store IT equipment by delivering reliable and secure space and power with expert management support. However, as interconnection services and cloud providers continue to proliferate, space and power are only the beginning of a much larger conversation.
Colocation data centers have become foundational hubs for cloud access, interconnectivity services, and geographically distributed edge computing resources. In fact, the discussion around data centers is rapidly transitioning to one that revolves around workload placement – where workloads are best suited for the edge, for the cloud, and for private data center colocation.
Meeting Customer First Where They Are At
Data center facilities must be ready to meet customers where they are currently at in their digital journey and bridge them to new frontiers in the industry. Not only has the world rapidly increased pace toward digitization, but businesses also had to follow suit this year to support remote working environments and optimize growth strategies to support advancing technology such as IoT and edge computing.
A Starting Point
Some enterprise customers are moving into colocation for the first time. Whether customers seek disaster recovery services or the onset of a remote workforce is throttling a transition of their on-premises environment to a highly connected colocation facility, this may be the first-time organizations learn about leveraging multi-cloud services or ‘edge computing.’
Alternatively, a number of companies were already leveraging public clouds and many launched into the cloud during COVID, as a rapid solution for managing their digital environments. They now find themselves addressing their cloud deployments to reduce the high costs associated with the volume of data transacted through cloud channels. Wherever customers are as 2020 wraps up, data center partners must support growth with more than space and power. Companies making their digital transformations now realize the value of hybrid cloud environments, and strategic colocation partners must be ready to support key interconnection and hybrid strategies.
Hybrid Workload Placement Strategy
Ultimately, taking a hybrid cloud approach is popular because enterprises can cater to the individual needs of different workloads and data sets, managing their data demand in a fully connected system that leverages the best of both environments. A hybrid solution means that businesses use services, storage, and computing resources across a mix of providers of cloud providers and a private data center infrastructure. For example, highly sensitive data can be housed securely in a private facility, while workloads that require dynamic compute resources can be entrusted to the public cloud.
How A Hybrid Colocation Data Center Operates
Colocation data centers are key to cloud computing and hybrid cloud success in 2021 because it provides businesses with greater flexibility and alternatives for workload deployment without unwanted tradeoffs.
Cost
Data and workloads exist everywhere – at the edge, in core colocation data centers, and in public cloud data centers. Data and apps may be multiplying but business budgets and resources are not. Businesses must be thoughtful about the workloads and services that run in cloud environments; egress fees related to data transfers can be cost-prohibitive. With a hybrid cloud and colocation infrastructure, businesses can mitigate costs with connections between their public cloud and private environment, drawing upon the right resources to match demand and cost initiatives. A hybrid cloud model makes it easier to divide IT consumption into capital and operational costs as well.
Security & Control
The best way to protect data is to keep it in a private data center, under your control. With combined, public and private environments enterprises retain control – which is a common oversight in an all-cloud deployment.
Compliance
Public clouds offer a beneficial global reach for today’s users. And certainly, workloads can be located almost anywhere and still provision networking, storage, and computing services. However, national boundaries and regulatory limits come into play based upon where companies store data and operate compute workloads. This complicates an all-cloud play for multinational organizations. Enterprises are becoming increasingly aware of data sovereignty regulations and recognize the imperative to efficiently choose what data they want to be deployed in colocation or the cloud. For example, in Europe, companies can be fined up to 4% of their annual global turnover if they break data sovereignty regulations that protect EU citizens and their private information from being transferred across certain borders. This creates challenges for businesses using a cloud-only approach, challenges for which colocation can solve.
Edge Architectures
Since public cloud data centers are much fewer and farther between than colocation facilities, colocation can bring your workload closer to your end-users than those architectures hosted in a public cloud data center. There is rapid growth in the implementation of IoT solutions and advancing technologies that require geographically placed compute environments. Enterprise businesses find themselves less able to leverage data centers distantly located like cloud services providers as they focus on customer experiences delivered on outward-facing applications that demand lower latency. Customer adoption of these technologies and trends keeping pushing data storage and computing closer to the edge so businesses must develop strategies for their cloud-hosted workloads and their colocated workloads in order to meet these edge demands.
Cloud & Colocation Is No Longer An Either/Or Choice
2021 heralds a year when nearly 90% of enterprises worldwide will build their IT strategy around a mix of private data storage and public cloud solutions to modernize their applications, according to the International Data Corporation. Hybrid architectures allow enterprise customers to accommodate more diverse requirement sets and leverage the best of both environments. The decision between colocation versus cloud computing is no longer mutually exclusive as companies strategically implement solutions for completing various tasks through a distributed platform, thereby leveraging the cloud’s speed and agility in concert with a colocation facility’s security and performance.
—
Element Critical simplifies the colocation partnership for businesses by delivering data center solutions that check the boxes for hybrid colocation. Our services are provisioned with high-touch customer care and customizable options regardless of the size of your deployment. Our Silicon Valley data center SV1 offers two carrier-neutral meet-me rooms, direct cloud on-ramps for a seamless multi-cloud connection through Pureport, dual fiber entrances with dark and lit services available with the low latency proximity to your San Jose and Bay area users. SV1 is located in the San Jose Valley at 1360 Kifer Road, Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Learn more at: https://elementcritical.com/lp/silicon-valley-data-center-services/
