Finding applicable methods to control costs and simulate growth are the foundational concepts of entrepreneurial management. While traditional techniques designed to govern personnel and equipment performances are still effective, the modern marketplace demands that IT resources also offer a similar flexibility. Businesses that migrate their data centers to a colocation provider’s facility experience two key advantages: increased scalability and decreased capital expenses.
Scalable Solutions
On-premise data centers suffer from sizing challenges. Companies must determine current capacity requirements and somehow gauge future performance needs, which often leads to miscalculations. Trying to plan data center capabilities for five or ten years in advance will generally result in wasted energy, and by the time greater capacity is required, a business may discover that the technology has become outdated.
Inadequate resources will also generate problems. When a business expands new capital outlays are required to adjust data center performance and functionality, so companies find themselves in a never-ending cycle of buy, integrate, repeat.
However, data centers housed with a colocation provider offer scalable solutions and improved IT performance in a secure, reliable environment for any size enterprise. Flexible pay-as-you-go service agreements allow companies to maintain a base level of volume and permit the inclusion of increased capabilities when required. This option is especially pertinent for companies that experience seasonally high volumes, such as accounting services or retailers.
Lowered Costs
Building and housing a data center on premise is a costly undertaking. Rising cost is one of the reasons that colocation service is becoming so widespread.
Transferring data centers to a colocation provider moves IT capital expenses to operating expenses, with predictable costs each month. Moreover, expenses such as energy use and back-up power generation are offset. Most colocation providers operate on the five nines principle: seamless service 99.999% of the time. This is because their facilities are designed solely for data centers and have controlled environments and multiple layered contingency plans in place. The same level of disaster recovery is much more expensive to create in-house.
Colocation also reduces staffing costs. Many providers include management options in their service agreements so that companies may take advantage of professional reliability without extensive labor expenses. The IT staff is able to operate and deal with a variety of situations as they arise with precision expertise.
Colocation offers today’s businesses real solutions for controlling the costs and scalability of their data centers, making it easy and affordable to support IT solutions that will perpetuate business growth.