In today’s day and age, organizations need a robust mission-critical IT infrastructure to innovate and drive business value. Much of this transformation is being driven by the adoption of the cloud as an agile, flexible, and scalable solution to ensure business growth.

That being said, the economies of scale that cloud providers can deliver, extend into the facilities space. In other words, cloud services are functionally IT services and not facilities services. Hence, they still need a data centre space, specifically a hybrid colocation data centre set up to place their hardware systems.

Why colocation facilities? Colocation data centres enable businesses to integrate their owned hardware, software and data with the existing cloud services infrastructure, without having to invest in an on-premise data centre or retrofit their existing legacy, purpose-built data centres to handle the increased workload within the same footprint.

Given the fact that the latest IT infrastructure increasingly demands a higher power density to handle more workloads, colocation data centre facilities provide the much-needed state-of-the-art components such as high- and low-tension electrical panels, change-over panels, power distribution units(PDU), transformers, switchgear, and high-speed diesel generators to ensure an uninterrupted supply of power.

Why should the enterprises move their mission-critical assets to colocation?

Moving their mission-critical deployments to colocation facilities is a profitable strategy for businesses, mainly due to the following reasons:

• Data Centre Design Improvements

Colocation providers can offer space, power, and cooling at much fewer prices than that of the dedicated on-premise data centres. Colocation data centres come equipped with modern-day infrastructure upgrades such as precision air handling units (PAHU), treated fresh air units (TFA) and computer room air conditioning (CRAC) machines being managed through a supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) and building management systems (BMS).

Compared to an on-premise data centre facility; however, businesses have to spend less upfront capital investment for the complex yet resource-rich data centre environment and have less to worry about when it comes to continual, seamless maintenance.

• Increased Computing Demands

Various factors such as virtualization and the continuous drive to handle ever-increasing workloads put a tremendous strain on dedicated data centres. Even retrofitting an older data centre facility turns out to be a more expensive long-term proposition than investing in colocation services, in terms of the Total Cost of Ownership.

By building and staffing multiple distributed data centres across different geographical locations, companies can improve their data availability and handling capabilities. Whether it is the applications based on the SaaS model or those channelling an IaaS or PaaS model, a colocation data centre effectively covers all these environments, by hosting their physical servers and private clouds within the same facility. As a result, enterprises stand to gain as their infrastructure will be one hop closer to the cloud.

How Does Colocation Fit into Cloud Management?

Many organizations fail to manage their cloud deployments effectively. Typically, this happens because of re-positioning existing IT departments to leverage cloud services. That said, organizations also lose out on visibility because only direct executive-level communication occurs with cloud service providers.

On the other hand, keeping critical businesses processes in a local colocation facility enables the IT departments of such organizations to exercise control over the decentralized cloud network with far greater effectiveness.

In case of any technical issues, for example, the IT teams at the colocation facility are equipped to resolve the problem themselves. Thus, businesses save up time, otherwise spent on creating a support ticket with their cloud service provider and waiting for them to take an appropriate resolution.

Colocation Improves the Cloud Performance

Businesses strive for a 100% uptime at all times. Given the fact, different workloads need different levels of resilience. Thus, colocation data centre services comprise customizable power densities, fault tolerance, redundancy, and load balancing options along with cloud-enabled services.

These features can be customized based on the individual data centre requirements for businesses. Moreover, as IT services move towards mutually multiple geographically diverse clouds, colocation becomes a central point in the interconnected centralized data centre systems.

Meanwhile, colocation data centre in Delhi and elsewhere, offered by reputable service providers such as STT GDC India also provide managed services, private server spaces, and other added value options to help organizations develop strategic or business-driven applications.

Overall, large-scale cloud providers can maximize their efficacy by consolidating data availability through colocation data centres.