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In today’s digitally-driven day and age, to keep up with the fast-paced market, companies can either succeed or fail – based on their network infrastructure. Even if a business does not provide products or services through the internet, it is frequently used for marketing/sales, administrative, or mission-critical applications.
Establishing a dependable and efficient IT infrastructure is thus critical towards the long-term success of any company. Whether a business is establishing its data systems for the very first time or migrating from an in-house solution to a colocation data centre, it must evaluate which method is most suited to its expected needs. In most situations, businesses have two options – colocation services or cloud services.
Understanding Colocation Data Centres
Businesses have started to make considerable investments in physical IT infrastructure, as this serves as the backbone of most businesses in today’s digitally driven world. Typically, such IT infrastructure takes the shape of servers, hard drives, and other computer resources. However, the issue with keeping and operating such equipment in-house, whether be it in a private data centre facility or in a designated server room, is the massive power as well as cooling requirements.
Even the most basic IT solution needs a significant amount of electricity to function, not to mention the cooling equipment also needs to be installed and maintained to ensure everything keeps operating smoothly. In addition, the expense of operating such resources on a daily basis may quickly pile up, leading to higher CAPEX costs.
In comparison, when a business opts for colocation data centre services, they can just lease/rent space in the third-party data centre and install their equipment there – thus cutting down on the cost of constructing and maintaining their data centre infrastructure.
Advantages of Colocation Data Centre Services
Colocation data centre services offer far more than just space – it even provides access to the facility’s power as well as cooling infrastructure, which enables significantly cheaper costs attributable to economies of scale and higher efficiency requirements. In addition, leveraging colocation services enable businesses to use the facility’s vast connection choices to access a number of services that would be considerably more difficult, if not impossible, to instal in-house.
In addition, opting for a local colocation services can also assist businesses in using edge computing methods to deliver improved services to their consumers. Moreover, colocation services ensure that enterprises that must conform to stringent compliance and regulatory standards retain complete control over business equipment as well as data.
A competent colocation data centre would also incorporate intelligent monitoring solutions, allowing their clients to practise improved monitoring for their assets at any and all times, giving them the added comfort that comes with the knowledge that they possess complete control over their business’s physical infrastructure.
Such monitoring technologies, when combined with 24/7, round the week, around the year remote hands services, provides clients with the same transparency and accessibility that they would anticipate of their own private data centre (and all without having to make any significant capital investment) [1].
Additionally, colocation data centre services are indeed a superior alternative for businesses that want to back up their business-critical data in the case of natural catastrophes or emergencies. So, it is no surprise that colocation data centres are helping drive the data centre market growth, especially considering they fulfil these different requirements.
Cloud Hosting Services
Cloud hosting functions almost similarly to colocation data centres, other than the exception that the space that businesses rent to execute their operations is virtual rather than physical.
Here, businesses migrate their data and applications from physical servers by moving them to the cloud provider’s virtualized servers following the selection of a cloud provider. Moreover, businesses delegate their daily infrastructure management to the cloud provider, enabling their IT professionals to enhance focus on strategic priorities.
Advantages of Cloud Hosting Services
The cloud is considerably more adaptable than traditional IT infrastructure as it is not a physical location. As a result, when a business plans to expand its data storage capabilities or enhance its processing power to build a new application, it essentially acquires additional services from the cloud provider.
This simplified process makes it much easier for cloud-based companies to expand their business really quick. Besides, clients only spend money on the computing resources used and the added benefit to alter their demands over time, thanks to most cloud providers’ ‘pay-as-you-go’ arrangements[1].
However, when it comes to cloud services, the lack of control is the most difficult aspect of switching to cloud hosting services. Clients could still access data and apps (at least when the cloud is up and going; clients must verify their SLA uptime guarantee), but they don’t control or operate the servers that hold these resources.
Colocation versus. Cloud: Is There a Better Option?
Even though you will find some fundamental distinctions between the colocation data centre and cloud solutions, the two are not essentially incompatible. On the contrary, clients are increasingly getting the best of all worlds from data centres – all thanks to network designs incorporating many features of the two IT services.
While the open nature of the cloud platform makes it easier to exploit, it makes security a big consideration. Whereas colocation data centre facilities offer superior protection, it lacks the flexibility of the cloud. While a complete colocation or cloud services may be suitable for several businesses, it is crucial to note that such approaches to IT infrastructure are not inherently incompatible.
When integrated within a resilient data centre infrastructure, hybrid cloud models and multi-cloud deployment solutions may offer businesses the greatest aspects of each platform while reducing their drawbacks.
Amongst the many companies, you can explore award-winning colocation data centre services from leading providers such as STT GDC India. They are a market leader in the Indian DC industry, operating 18 state-of-the-art colocation data centre facilities, in 9 key cities across the country, with a cumulative IT Load capacity of 135 MW. With STT GDC India, you can be sure to achieve operational excellence and leverage competitive advantage!
