Growing organizations often find themselves weighing the pros and cons of building their own data center versus buying colocation hosting services.
Various market research firms have found that the total price of constructing a data center onsite can cost up to $3,000 per square foot.
Businesses must make a critical decision: Should they bite the bullet and absorb the costs of an onsite data center construction or should they look at colocating their servers into a nearby data center?
If you’re being tasked with these critical decisions, consider these distinct advantages that colocation provides over onsite data centers.
Colo Gives Your Organization More Long Term Value
Let’s face it, most IT departments aren’t turning a profit for their companies; IT departments are there to save the company money on critical IT infrastructures.
Although having IT staff is absolutely necessary for most businesses, the size of your IT staff will likely be proportional the amount of infrastructure that your business has built onsite.
Theoretically, if your IT staff has less responsibilities, there should be a smaller chance of an outage occurring on your network.
When you put your servers in a nearby colocation data center, your IT staff won’t have to worry about power outages, network outages or outages that are out of the realm of your IT crew’s control.
Maintain a Nimble, Talented IT Staff
With this in mind, consider the fact that onsite data centers require constant maintenance, monitoring and staffing.
Combined with the fact that private data center outages occur more frequently than they do in a colocation data center, it’s easy to see why colo is becoming a more popular choice for businesses all around the world.
Not every organization has the budget to bring on additional IT staff that can be available to perform the core tasks associated with data center administration.
With this in mind, doesn’t it make more sense to hire a small, talented IT staff that can perform systems administration tasks remotely?
Your Organization Can Focus on Sales, Not Deploying IT Infrastructure
Building a data center is less cost effective than colocation services. In fact, over a 10 year period, colocation is actually 42.3 percent less expensive based on a standard build-out for a medium sized company! Building your own facility will require wiring, a sophisticated cooling system, raised floor space and a physical security system that meets or exceeds industry standards.
If your business is growing rapidly, consider leasing colocated data center space for your critical IT systems.
By deploying IT infrastructure inside of a colocated data center, your business will can focus on what it does best: making sales and converting leads.
The best part of implementing a data center colocation strategy is that your business can buy as much as data center space as it needs, and your IT staff will never have to worry about addressing the root causes of network outages, power outages or physical security breaches ever again.
