Colocation hosting is the perfect solution for businesses or organisations that don't want the expense of maintaining a round-the-clock secure building to house their servers. As well as freeing up valuable floorspace, outsourcing back-end infrastructure to a colocation service provider has many other benefits.

Purpose-built data centres designed for colocation are becoming increasingly common. These facilities host the inner workings of a business’s IT systems offsite while at the same time reducing power consumption, freeing up office space and providing invaluable physical security for the server, storage and networking equipment.

Cost benefits

Running and maintaining large back-end infrastructures onsite can be very costly, partly because of the associated hardware and electricity costs, but also due to the need for constant care from onsite technicians. For businesses operating on numerous sites, this cost is significantly multiplied as every location will require staff with the technical know-how to keep the systems running. Not to mention the cost associated with the constant need for software and hardware updates to the equipment itself.

With a hosted colocation service these costs are alleviated, as all data from every branch of a multi-sited organisation is housed in the same secure location, managed by a team of dedicated experts who will manage a business’s physical envrionment, ensuring round-the-clock security, power availability and environmental management. This is more cost-efficient than employing full time technicians to maintain the network onsite.

Time and benefits

A reliable colocation service means that a business’s skilled IT technicians are freed up, allowing them to focus on more important front-end business applications -- the types of thing that can make a long-term, positive difference to the efficiency, dynamism and flexibility of an organisation. When an IT team is more involved in the actual optimisation of a business, rather then just fighting networking fires, it tends to value its work a lot more, as do others around it.

Security benefits

High-security data centres ensure that business critical systems are protected to a level that would be hard to achieve in an onsite environment. Suites will be monitored 24/7, making them highly resilient to physical intrusion, unauthorised physical presence and disasters such as theft, fire or flooding.

Colocation is the modern-day solution to a problem as old as IT itself: a lack of understanding surrounding emerging technologies and the costs associated with keeping up with them. By working with a managed hosting service, the complexities of a business’s network are out of sight, out of mind and any problems are dealt with quickly and permanently. The hassle of maintaining a system is taken out of the equation completely, leaving a business to continue running its day-to-day business and focusing on what it does best.