Colocation has long been a steady presence in the world of enterprise IT solutions. With the rise of the public cloud many predicted a decline in this kind of interconnection services. Instead, the converse is true: colocation is booming and does not look to slow any time soon. The interconnection market is growing, especially for larger organizations. Data centers across the board are spending more on their facilities as more enterprise businesses are using more colocation services than ever before. Rather than threaten or replace it, public cloud adoption has spurred the demand for colocation. As the cloud surges, so too does colocation. So what gives? To read more about the case for colocation, check out our ebook.
Colocation and the Cloud
Instead of replacing data center facilities with cloud strategies, businesses have been using them to complement each other. This trend is true in industries like energy, manufacturing, retail, transportation and utilities, as well as highly-regulated sectors such as healthcare and financial services. As more companies delve into tech, they are leveraging a blend of cloud services and colocation, choosing particular solutions for certain tasks in a strategy known as hybrid cloud. For example, even if an enterprise operates their own data centers for mission-critical databases, they may choose to host daily processing systems on a separate server at an interconnection facility. Not all workloads are meant for a public cloud of shared resources. Enterprise IT professionals now can match each asset with the best resource whether it be cloud, colocation, or managed hosting. The prominence of these considerations will only continue to increase with the rise of machine learning and big data applications.
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Colocation and Big Data
In short, the emergence of big data has led to a renewed dependence on colocation for enterprise businesses. In the evolution of business technology, the Internet of Things now produces mountains of information. Factories, supply chains, power grids, distributed products – the sensor data to manage, store, organize, and analyze is vast and the risk of overextending on-premises infrastructure is real. Even for companies that traditionally supplied in-house IT services by buying and maintaining their own servers, as effective IoT-driven businesses grow the resultant big data creates a need for closer data transfers – and thus the need to push data processing closer to end users.
Why Colocation?
So, we now understand that colocation isn’t going away; it’s growing. It’s developing in step with cloud solutions and the resultant big data from the next wave of business technology will only magnify colocation’s importance. But why exactly are enterprises turning to colocation facilities as a solution? What does it offer? In short, it reduces costs, provides more agility, penetrates new markets rapidly, and delivers digital services closer to the customer, thus improving performance and end-user experience. As the eBook The Case For Colocation explores, using a colocation data center can provide your business with these and many other competitive advantages.