6 Reasons why Colocation Can Help Small Businesses
Written by Darren Lobb Wednesday, October 24 2012
Is it Right for Your Business?
It can be difficult for small businesses to find the right IT solution. In-house solutions are often inadequate and quickly become expensive. Plus, there are space limitations as the business grows. Building an off-site data center from the ground up is a financial impossibility. Retrofitting is equally cost prohibitive and does not offer the same benefits as a purpose built data center. Colocation has consistently proven to provide small businesses with a variety of benefits no other alternative can match. A colocation center rents equipment space and bandwidth to small businesses for a regular fee. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers—with a minimum of cost and complexity.
1. Small Businesses Gain Access to Unparalleled Support Services
The first benefit colocation provides small businesses are unparalleled support services. Colocation facilities feature expertly trained IT support staff which is made available to small businesses around the clock. On their own, small businesses rarely have the financial flexibility to support and IT staff 24-7. Plus, the IT staff at an in-house data center is often not as well trained. This is because they spend all their time dealing with day-to-day activities, rather than enhancing their IT knowledge and skills.
2. Colocation Facilities Provide Improved Infrastructure
Another benefit small businesses gain from colocation is access to elite infrastructure. Purpose built colocation data centers have been built from the ground up which allows them to utilize IT friendly designs. This includes multiple layers of redundancy to ensure continuous uptime. Additionally, they are designed to provide a clean working environment to insure servers are always operating as efficiently as possible.
3. Colocation Allows Small Businesses to Grow at Their Own Pace
One of the biggest problems small businesses face when choosing how to manage their physical IT assets is space. In-house data centers quickly become too small as the business grows while retrofitting a building or creating a new data center from the ground up is financially impossible. Not only do they require an enormous initial capital investment, but they also create a significant amount of unused space. Colocation allows small businesses to rent only the amount of rack space they need with the ability to scale as needed.
4. Purpose-Built Colocation Data Centers Reduce Energy Consumption
It has been consistently proven that purpose built data centers have greater opportunity to reduce overall levels of energy consumption. Improved power efficiency not only reduces the amount of power the entire data center uses, but also decreases the total power costs for small businesses renting space.
5. Small Businesses Benefit from Improved Buying Power
On their own, small businesses do not have the clout to benefit from lower bandwidth and power rates offered to larger data centers. Colocation gives them an opportunity to improve their buying power because prices are negotiated by the colocation provider that provides power and bandwidth to a multitude of customers.
6. Small Business Gain Access to Increased Carrier Networks
Quality colocation data centers offer small businesses in a multitude of carrier networks to choose from. This continuous competition forces carriers to lower their bandwidth prices, which saves small businesses money. Additionally, having multiple carrier networks available allows businesses to switch carriers at a moment’s notice. This is particularly beneficial if one carrier is an experiencing an outage.
While numerous options are available, only colocation offers small businesses with all of these benefits.