Making a decision on a data center or colocation provider is neither easy nor is it to be taken lightly. There are a lot of factors to consider when making a choice that has the potential to impact your mission critical infrastructure – especially now that it’s housed in someone else’s facility.
But you’ve made this choice to at least get all the facts straight so that you can make a well informed decision. I have good news, you’ve already made one great choice and that’s to move your data offsite and into the hands of professionals that can monitor and protect your data around the clock.
This is where it gets a little tricky. As with any industry, the right choice for one organization may not be right choice for your organization. I’d like to stress the importance of location when looking at data centers.
Yes, it can be important to be close to your data center, but that’s not always realistic for a number of reasons. How can I tell you that you need to be close to your data center and that it needs to be in a region that has a low risk of natural disaster when your organization is located in a high risk area? Can it be a hassle to have your corporate headquarters and data center hundreds of miles apart? Sure. But having just a few hours of downtime due to a hurricane, tornado or earthquake will undoubtedly cost your organization much more than simple inconvenience. And most data centers are able to manage installations and upgrades themselves – and any good data center has a strong emphasis on customer service and support, so there’s not much to worry about if you’re sending your data to another region.
The fact is, the states with the highest concentration of data centers are also the most disaster prone. Except that some states, like New York, are pretty huge. How can you compare NYC and Buffalo, NY in any terms, much less when considering natural disasters? NYC has seen its fair share of hurricanes, but Western and Upstate New York aren’t ever threatened by anything more than heavy snowfall – and while blizzards are inconvenient, they don’t create a substantial amount of downtime.
Here at ColoCrossing, not only do we provide 100% Uptime SLA, but we back it up too. In the past year at our new facility in Downtown Buffalo, we’ve never had an outage, boasting 100% uptime for the year. That’s a pretty substantial accomplishment.
So while Buffalo may not sound like a cutting edge city, it’s a safe one for your mission critical infrastructure. Feel free to contact us for more information regarding the wide range of products and services that we provide – and stay safe.
