When you begin building out IT infrastructure for your business, it is important to devise a strategy that helps your organization gain the most value from its resources.
When you begin pricing IT services, you’ll likely become bombarded with companies trying to sell you a cloud solution. While some cloud services may justify the monthly expense, your organization can likely save money by colocating hardware in a data center.
Let’s take a closer look at critical IT services that are better suited to be deployed using a colocation solution.
Hypervisors
Hyper-V and VMware continue to dominate the hypervisor market with most companies using these solutions for their corporate workloads.
While VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines can be spun up in a cloud, many organizations prefer to use their own hardware when deploying VMs.
Why? When you deploy in a cloud, how can you be certain that data is safe from attacks that are specifically designed to compromise cloud containers?
While these attacks haven’t been discovered in the wild, the threat of a hypervisor breakout attack is a top concern of those tasked with keeping corporate data secure.
PBX and Phone Systems
ColoCrossing’s data centers can provide your business with rich bandwidth that will allow your organization to setup telephony systems for your end users.
There is a plethora of cloud based VoIP solutions out there that bill you per user, per month. While it may seem like less of a hassle to pay a cloud vendor for telephone services, you might be surprised to find that it is easier and more cost effective than you’d think to build your own enterprise phone system.
One popular system is called FreePBX, which is open source. This phone system can be downloaded from the FreePBX.org website.
CRMs
Some cloud vendors such as SalesForce have made a business model out of delivering a superb CRM product in the cloud.
When your business needs a basic CRM that keeps track of your leads, several popular open source CRM platforms exist that can get the job done.
Many businesses simply lease a dedicated server and setup the software they prefer. Popular CRMs used on dedicated servers are SuiteCRM, FreeCRM, and vTiger.
Active Directory/LDAP
For some organizations, there may be peace of mind in having your Active Directory or LDAP infrastructure hosted on dedicated hardware.
Recently, Microsoft Azure’s Active Directory authentication service suddenly became unavailable for much of Europe on December 3rd 2015.
Since these users were unable to authenticate, they were unable to login to their Office 365 email, access their OneDrive files or access any other service that required their Azure AD privileges.
This high profile outage was resolved within hours, however, the impact was felt as many users took to social media to vent their frustrations.
When your business uses colocated servers to host your corporate authentication infrastructure, you can ensure that your users always have the ability to authenticate rapidly and reliably in order to gain access to the services you host.
