How to choose your colocation facility provider?

As the expenses of operating and maintaining on-premises data centres grow, businesses are rethinking their infrastructure and seeking to reduce on-premises data centre capacity.

Colocation data centre providers have become a more appealing and less capex heavy alternative for enterprises, offering physical infrastructure offering reliable power, cooling, network, as well as physical security services.

When constructing your offshore IT infrastructure for private cloud deployment, disaster recovery planning, or hosting apps, performing much better on physical servers or have specific licensing needs, choosing the proper colocation provider and data centre facilities is essential.

Servers

When you investigate colocation data centre operators, selecting the appropriate colocation facility for your data centre requirements can be difficult with numerous aspects to consider. As a result, it is critical to make the correct selection when identifying a colocation facility that fits your present and future demands, so you wouldn’t have to worry about the complexity, and downtime associated with shifting data centres over the next few years.

Expert tips to keep in mind when choosing your colocation facility provider.

Here are the key points to consider when selecting a colocation provider to guarantee you decide what is best for your business[1]:

1. Begin by comprehending your existing environment and requirements.

It is mission-critical technologies that enable your company goals — and data centres are where your technology is housed. So, the best way to begin your search for finding the ideal colocation facility is by assessing your existing environment’s effectiveness, cost, as well as risks.

For example, how much downtime do you get in a year? What is the source of the downtime? Is your company potentially vulnerable to a natural or man-made catastrophic event? How about data, security, and compliance regulations?

It is also critical to define the role of technological innovation in accomplishing your organizational objectives. This entails soliciting feedback and opinions from people outside of the IT department.

What do the departments, including human resources, finance, administration, sales, operations, manufacturing, and others use, and how do they access technology? What operating systems or applications are such technologies or apps based on? Are they hosted in the cloud or over a physical server?

By developing an inventory assessment of your IT infrastructure assets, you could also detect end-of-life components. The very last thing you would like to know is that it’s time to upgrade your IT hardware. The option of doing nothing, on the other hand, might be catastrophic. This might trigger more discussions about the necessity for a colocation facility or disaster recovery plans.

In any scenario, irrespective of whatever colocation facility provider you choose, completing an audit and building inventories of your IT infrastructure will highly benefit your business.

2. Define your information technology plan for the next few years.

We examined how your company leverages technology to achieve its goals and objectives. We’ve spoken about the technology’s function and the present climate. But what about the future? Where do you see your company in a year? What about a five-year plan? What does that imply? Do you use the cloud for specific applications? how many mission critical infrastructure applications are there?

Determine what you’d like to accomplish now as well as in the future, along with the considerations of any specific business and IT needs that is backed by a plausible forecast for future development. When relocating a data centre, start with what you have, estimate your scalability requirements, and identify which services are required. Consider interacting with a specialist or industry experts to get assistance in defining your objectives for future deployments.

3. Choose the ideal location for your colocation facility.

Is it important where you are headquartered? When it concerns colocation services, the answer, unquestionably, is yes. The location of a colocation provider’s data centre facilities is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing a colocation service. Most organizations that inquire about colocation facility providers prefer a particular location, based in close proximity to their head or regional branch office. This makes plenty of sense since companies clearly want their IT staff and personnel nearby to handle maintenance, upgrades, fixes, and diagnostic troubleshooting.

Many organizations choose a data centre located in other cities, states, or regions for disaster recovery purposes, in addition to just being proximate to a headquarters or regional office.

For instance, if your company is based in Delhi and you want a Disaster Recovery (DR) site in a different seismic zone, then Hyderabad might be the ideal location for your backup colocation facility. The goal is to locate a low-risk zone for natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, cyclones, floods, and several other natural calamities causing business disruptions.

Your way ahead to finding the best colocation facility providers.

When choosing the best colocation data centre, there are several variables to consider. However, in the end, it’s all about the colocation facility and whether or not it meets the unique requirements of your business.

So, if you are looking for a leading data centre services provider, you can explore reputable and trusted companies such as STT GDC India. They are a market leader in the Indian DC industry, providing best-of-breed colocation services to ensure operational excellence to businesses.

STT GDC India, currently operates 18 data centre facilities, in nine key Indian cities, backed with an IT load capacity of 140 MW. They are also amongst one of the fastest-growing colocation facility providers in India, and are expanding their footprint across India to fulfill the growing demands of businesses, enterprises and hyperscalers alike.

For more details, head to their website and discover their suite of services today!

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