Co-location – Where your technology resides
Whether you are a business in today’s era that needs technology for getting its competitive edge, or a services provider, the core to smooth functioning of your business is robust infrastructure. For quite a few years from the time when computing made its first appearance, computers were used within the physical limits of the office itself, at the most connected through a local area network.
As technology, networking and telecommunications advanced, businesses started getting all their offices connected through private networks. Key data pertaining to the business were now accessible to all the functions of the organisation, and the management too. The rapidly widening spread of technology necessitated a different type of infrastructure, such as servers and leased circuits, over a much larger geography.
In this article, we will discuss the traditional method of co-location through rented premises, and the new concepts of cloud computing based services that provide similar services in a cost effective manner.
Co-location – shared model for physical hosting
For a company whose network spreads far and wide, it is impractical to have its own datacenters or offices in each and every city, where it can host its networking equipment. This is when companies rent out physical space with Co-location service providers. These companies provide all the necessary infrastructure to host and maintain uptime of remotely located network infrastructure. The company need not make any hefty real estate investment to get its own space just for hosting small equipment.
The first phase of growth of the Internet saw a surge in the number of companies that offered co-location for organisations to host their remote hardware. The benefits were clear and were lapped up by companies that saw value in the proposition. Some of the obvious benefits were:
- Reduced capital expenditure – No requirement to procure and maintain new offices, especially in cities where real estate requirements can sap all the money the organisation has.
- All necessary pre-requisites taken care of – Uninterrupted and stable power, Air Conditioning, Rack Mounting are all managed completely by the service provider
- Clients just need to pay a monthly fee.
Co-location and the emergence of Private Cloud based services
One of the core reasons companies opted for Co-location is that the companies wanted complete ownership of the server – physically. This is for reasons of information security. As businesses felt the need to get more agile and be able to reduce capital expenditure to its lowest, cloud computing as a concept gained prominence.
Today, thanks to evolved Information Security standards and Networking, companies can now create their own secure Private Cloud, within their co-location setup. This arrangement allows the company to create a large pooled IT infrastructure, which is easily scalable to cater to various departments within the company. The private cloud is delivered from within a co-location environment under the protection of the company’s firewall and IT security policies.
Private cloud based co-location solutions are now fast becoming popular due to their dual advantage of security with scalability. It takes the cost advantage of the traditional co-location one-step ahead.
Companies can now host their precious data and share it across their offices through private cloud based hosting solutions saving costs as well as deployment time.
If you are interested in building a private cloud then please contact us and we will recommend the best data centre available within your budget.
