The biggest competitor against colocated data center businesses isn’t other data center businesses; More often than not, you’ll find that cloud service providers are becoming the main competition.
When businesses begin to utilize colocation, they’ll find that they have more control over their workloads when compared to using an IaaS cloud provider. Businesses can begin to see inherit advantages in using colocated infrastructure, depending on the requirements of your business.
In some industries, organizations are unable to take chances on storing data in the public cloud. With others, businesses may find that they get better performance when building out servers using bare metal infrastructure.
Let’s take a closer look at the reasons a business would select colocation service provider over a cloud IaaS provider.
The Ability to Host Bare Metal Servers
As we briefly mentioned above, being able to host bare metal servers in a colocated data center ensures your workload the ability to operate without having to worry about a cloud service failure that would somehow impact the accessibility of your services.
By hosting your apps on a bare metal server, your business will be able to rapidly pinpoint a problem, should one occur, rather than wait for a response from a cloud service provider on a potential widespread outage. Some system administrators just like having full control over their servers.
With bare metal servers, your business will be able know every spec on the hardware that your apps are running upon. This can prove to be important, should want to replicate every exact metric of your workload elsewhere.
When you colocate with a provider like ColoCrossing, you can rest assured that your bare metal servers are being colocated in a data center that possesses SSAE 16 certifications or other types of industry recognized security certifications in which protocols are in place that help prevent unauthorized access to your physical servers.
Guaranteed Data Privacy with Colo
When you colocate your servers, you have as much privacy over your servers that you choose to setup.
You could even deploy a separate private network inside of a colocated data center in order to work on your development platform that is completely segmented from your production environment.
Putting your servers in a colocated data center gives your business all of the security that you choose to configure on your servers. When you utilize cloud, there is a whole other layer of security that you must learn.
The Problem with Using Cloud Platforms
Administrators only know what they currently know, therefore, using cloud IaaS provider requires a working knowledge of the principles surrounding that specific cloud platform.
These skills are currently fetching a premium in the job market. While that’s great news for cloud job seekers; the cost of having to pay someone who is competent in the latest cloud technologies certainly contributes to the hidden cost of buying cloud services.
Hiring someone who is incompetent on these skills could cost your business even more. When you build out your infrastructure using colocation services, you’ll be hire talent that is competent in traditional networking scenarios.
Consider these factors when weighing colo versus cloud.
