How Cloud Drives Colocation
Controlling the Explosion
Recent data and automated process accumulation has resulted in an explosion of systems and information. As companies grow and thrive, infrastructure can become unwieldy and a challenge to manage. Fortunately, cloud services can offer unlimited room for growth, but that space comes with its own challenges. Connecting cloud services together with native IT environments allows you to leverage the cloud’s benefits, control the explosion, and optimize everywhere. This hybrid architecture provides the flexibility and control to scale with your success and keep your business running smoothly.
Enter Colo
Colocation has been around a long time, so what’s changed? More than just space and power, smart colocation integrates connectivity, interconnection, an ecosystem of partners, and focuses on the performance needs of different verticals and user groups. Whether at the center of large SaaS providers and enterprise infrastructure, or at the edge of content networks, analytics hubs, and cloud on-ramps, colocation enables enterprises to stay agile and responsive in an age where user-friendliness is primary. Within this flexible model and provider hub, IT groups can design the infrastructure that serves their requirements and connect to services and vendors directly. The right colocation provider can offer your company an ecosystem, enabling you to optimize for performance, cost, security, time-to-market, and more. Through a vibrant community of complementary providers and diverse services, you gain the efficiency and ease of access necessary to make the most out of your time and resources.
In addition to offering an ecosystem of services and partners, colocation offers additional value when business processes change, and repatriation of certain workloads becomes more efficient. For example, that application you launched in the cloud became a tremendous success, and reached a scale where you realize that it can be run more efficiently (or inexpensively) if you bring it back in-house. Colocation makes workload repatriation a turn-key operation, so there’s no battle against network speeds, excessive data egress charges, or training staff on work-arounds.
Why wouldn’t customers just go back to their own datacenters? For one, operating datacenters is not a core competency for most companies; it’s the same reason nobody builds their own payroll systems or CRMs. Perhaps more importantly, savvy enterprises want to use best-of-breed services to power their business, and need to be in a position to connect to them, use them efficiently, and broker between them. Smart colocation offers these services in an ecosystem to help create your brokered hybrid environment. You can connect to any number of cloud service providers, provision private links within minutes to anywhere in the world, move or burst workloads between clouds, connect to your existing private datacenters, and operate at maximum efficiency.
Innovative cloud services continue to change businesses of all sizes, and are simultaneously driving increased usage of colocation as customers enable modern, multi-service environments. Smart colocation, whether at the center or edge of your environment, provides the platform to enable the optimal hybrid environment for your business.
For more insight, check out the new vXchnge blog post: Reducing Data Gravity in a Cloud-Centric IT Environment