What is Colocation?
Colocation provides the flexibility needed in a cloud-first world!
Colocation is where an organisation chooses to house privately-owned servers, storage devices and appliances, and networking equipment in a third-party data centre. Instead of the in-house scenario where IT infrastructure lives within a room or a section of an organisation’s own office, or a privately built data centre. Inhouse ownership and management of the data centre facility or office surroundings are the responsibility of the organisation to manage, maintain and fund. However, when IT equipment is colocated under a Data Centre-as-a-Service arrangement with a specialist provider (like NEXTDC) the customer is no longer responsible for the cost, resource or ongoing maintenance needed to power, secure, interconnect, scale and upgrade that facility.
Colocation is frequently deemed to be the more desirable option as it emulates the same scalable and flexible nature of cloud environments, which drives operational efficiencies, enables greater capability to access digital platforms and is achieved more cost-effectively as an operational expense (Opex) – as opposed to a Capex model for inhouse management. Benefits include:
- Highly flexible – scale up or scale down as required – and keep costs aligned with needs
- Architectural best practice for integrating multi-clouds with your own IT (optimising speed, security, performance)
- Flexibility in more easily moving your office locations without having to try and move a very complex data centre each time
- With staff more flexibly working from home, colocation addresses one of today’s biggest challenges, where an on-premises data centre now acts as an anchor opposed to enabling elastic scalability and capability
- Empowers organisations to deal with “what’s next” and proactively manage and respond to business disruptions, business opportunities, new initiatives, cost control, etc.
