Advertisment

To Cloud or to Co-locate: Where to Move Your Data Center?

Both colocation and cloud services offer you viable alternatives to traditional in-house data center solutions.

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update
cloud based ERP

– Nitin Mishra, Sr VP-Product Management, Netmagic

Advertisment

For any business enterprise choosing the right server infrastructure is critical to business success. Yet with the increase in the trends towards adoption of cloud computing by organizations, the IT infrastructure landscape is undergoing a major transformation. This trend calls for an open debate on the best direction that an organization can take with respect to its IT infrastructure in 2015 and beyond.

Having said this, the two key approaches for organizations that want to move away from on-premise data centers include either the more traditional colocation or the increasingly popular virtualized cloud route.

Both of these approaches can provide suitable solutions depending on an enterprise’s specific requirements and can help achieve the objectives as well as derive business value.

The underlying challenge

Doing more with less is the new mantra, as enterprises look up to their internal IT setups for improvements in customer experience, dealing with disruptions and growing revenues. Server infrastructure forms the core of any business technology agenda for delivering key services.

Much of this transformation of the IT department and subsequently the enterprise is being driven by the adoption of cloud as a flexible, agile and scalable solution to enable business growth. The burden of aging on-site IT equipment, including hardware and data center facilities are the key drivers for the shift from building an on-premise data center to hosting it off-site.

However, for enterprises that have already invested a significant amount of resources and capital in their in-house IT infrastructure, moving to the cloud may require a significant leap.

The agility, scalability and flexibility of a Cloud based infrastructure

69% of organizations have at least one application or a portion of their infrastructure in the cloud and 18% plan to use cloud applications in the coming 12 months, according to a recent IDG Enterprise report. In short this means that cloud has become an integral part of the IT infrastructure for most business enterprises.

Advantages

Scalability and agility - Cloud computing is on demand, enabling your business to have more space, power and bandwidth in an instant. It means your IT infrastructure can adapt fast and efficiently to the changing needs of your business. It encourages business innovation and is essential in an era of real-time big data and advanced analytics.

Cost-effective – Cloud is virtual so your service provider provides the infrastructure, software and platform, giving you reduced CAPEX and more control of your costs.

Highly flexible – With no capital outlay for cloud services, there’s no need to commit to a long-term contract. Pay for what you need and switch provider easily.

Hassle free – Your provider handles upgrades, maintenance and repairs, leaving you and your IT Team free to focus on core business.

Compliance – Cloud providers can ensure security procedures to demonstrate compliance. If you’re subject to regulations such as PCI DSS, SOX or HIPAA, make sure your cloud provider has the relevant accreditations.

Availability and support – A robust server infrastructure with minimal downtime is key to the running of business critical applications. Cloud offers good availability but check that this is detailed in your service level agreement. Also, find out what customer support is offered when problems do arise.

Disadvantages

Management and Migration – Cloud is still a relatively new concept so your team may not have the skills in-house to deploy key services onto a virtual environment.

Lack of control – Cloud is like buying a share of a server and although offloading management can be a good thing, IT managers lose control of this essential part of their infrastructure. Therefore it’s important to choose a cloud provider with excellent reviews and a strong track record.

Lock in and data ownership – As you don’t own the hardware, make sure there are procedures in place allowing you to retrieve your data when you need to and ensure there are no prohibitive costs in the process.

Costs and tipping point – Although the shared services provided by cloud benefit from economies of scale, you can actually outgrow the cost benefits and it may become more economically viable to use colocation.

The security of colocation

In colocation, space and bandwidth are rented which essentially means that businesses are able to use and maintain their own equipment such as servers, but share the cost of power, cooling, physical security and data center floor space with other tenants.

Although this is a more traditional approach to server infrastructure, a number of other factors continue to make colocation a viable option, particularly for larger businesses with in-house IT staff.

Advantages

Ownership and control – The biggest advantage of colocation is that the enterprise retains full control of the equipment, especially where an organization has to satisfy regulatory or data protection requirements. Colocation enables IT managers to control technology lifecycles and retrieve data as and when required.

Security and compliance – Colocation provides a dedicated environment for your server infrastructure, overcoming the security pitfalls of a shared environment. That makes it a good choice if your business is in an industry with tight data-protection regulations.

Provider expertise – Colocation enables your organization to gain from the expertise of skilled individuals who specialize in providing the service. Third party data centers are manned 24/7 by engineers who can also provide remote support for more complex work.

Resilience – Service level agreements are often more stringent for data centers and providers with multiple facilities can replicate the same information across more than one of their sites. They offer robust back-up services, added resilience and peace of mind.

Disadvantages

Cost of equipment – Colocation involves a large amount of capital outlay to purchase your own servers, storage, switches, and software, housing it in a secure and resilient facility and maintaining and updating the hardware whenever required. Although expensive, it does allow you to control the hardware you use, so that it’s optimized specifically for your applications.

Maintenance and monitoring – Although expertise is on hand, it doesn’t come as standard with colocation, meaning businesses either have to personally monitor their own hardware or pay extra to get their provider to do it.

Agility and growth – Data centers need to plan in advance for expansion and additional capacity. If your organization is looking at growth and expansion, you have to ensure that your provider is informed of the expectations and can provision resources in advance.

Convenience and location – Cloud can be managed remotely and your in-house IT department can maintain the in-house infrastructure. However, this is not so easy with when you colocate to an external data center, so when you go for colocation ensure that the facility located conveniently in the event that your team need on site access.

Cloud vs Colocation

Factors such as an organization’s strategic business aims, vertical market, budget, intended use and service levels influence the decision to opt for a Colocation or Cloud.

Untitled-1

Though both approaches to organizing your IT infrastructure can offer an ideal alternative to an in-house data center, the ideal route depends on both your organization’s current and future business strategy and requirements. One important thing to note here is that a public cloud does not support hosting legacy and RISC based applications, so for certain legacy and RISC based applications colocation may be the only option.

Another critical factor is choosing the right provider; your service provider must have the expertise to analyze your organization’s infrastructure requirements and should be have the capability to assist with migration and optimization.

If you opt for cloud, ensure that your business is ‘cloud ready’ and you have a roadmap in place to make sure your solution is optimized. For organizations that are still unsure of which route to take, a hybrid solution that includes multiple IT deployment models, may offer the best results.

Both colocation and cloud services offer you viable alternatives to traditional in-house data center solutions. Deciding whether to co-locate, move to the cloud or leverage both, should be based on your specific IT and business requirements.

Advertisment

Use cases for a colocated data center

COLOCATE FOR GREATER SCALABILITY

Forrester calls scalability one of the top benefits of colocation. “Additional capacity can be brought on quickly, cheaply, and only as needed.” TechRepublic echoes the same: “The common IT case for data center co-location is that you can scale out your data center quickly, and at 20% of the cost that it would take to construct your own data facility. … This is an attractive proposition for IT departments that must be frugal at the same time that they must be able to rapidly scale IT up or down, depending on the needs of the business.”

COLOCATE FOR LOWER TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP (TCO)

Organizations can typically colocate their data center for a much lower total cost than they could build and maintain a private data center. In August 2013, Forrester released the results of research into the total cost of ownership associated with building a traditional raised-floor data center, a modular data center, and data center colocation. The research group found that a modular data center has the lowest aggregate total cost. But data center colocation has significantly lower costs than a traditional build (37-52% lower net present value cost).

Build Or Colocate? The ROI Of Your Next Data Center

Untitled-2

Colocate for greater agility

As Forrester points out, the colocation model turns the capital expenditures associated with building a data center to operating expenditures associated with “renting” data center space. Meaning the organization has greater flexibility and agility. They can more quickly scale IT capacity where they need it, and reduce or eliminate IT capacity where there’s no longer a business case for it.

cloud
Advertisment