Three Key Considerations When Choosing the Right Colocation Provider for Your Business

The data center colocation market is growing by leaps and bounds, driven largely by enterprises continuing to outsource IT infrastructure and adopt cloud solutions. According to researchers at Markets and Markets, the data center colocation market is estimated to reach a total market size of $55.31 billion by the end of 2021. With this growth comes segmentation, and new trends in types of colocation providers.

Gartner describes the market at bifurcating into “pure” colocation, or providers offering purely space, power and communications, and “up the stack” higher-level service providers offering additional managed infrastructure services, cloud, security, interconnection and internetworking in addition to space, power and communications. In the second case, companies offering interconnection services has also come to mean connectivity to a large set of cloud and managed service provider options.
Critical and relatively standard considerations are physical infrastructure, redundancy and physical security; customers should also pay close attention to the managed services and connectivity options available within the provider’s building, as well as the teams supporting them.
Below are key considerations for customers vetting colocation providers.

Public and Private Cloud Services

The rapid adoption of hybrid strategies proves that cloud computing and colocation will be natural allies for many years to come. Selecting a data center provider that offers connectivity to public and private cloud services within their facilities allows customers to gain peace of mind, scale seamlessly and access platforms quickly and as-needed. Customers can also use the same IP addresses/networking between their own equipment and cloud in the facility. The customer’s virtual infrastructure can be augmented with a private connection to their cloud service provider’s cloud, enabling them to consume private cloud resources as if they were part of their existing infrastructure and as part of their existing cloud strategies.

Managed Infrastructure Solutions

With access to expansive managed services ecosystem, data center customers can also choose which parts of their environment to outsource to an array of different platform options; it’s no longer all-or-nothing. Selecting a provider that offers a range of managed services delivered incrementally behind your existing firewalls mitigates latency, integration and security concerns.

Security

As cyber-attacks continue to increase, data security continues to be a growing concern amongst today’s companies. Ideally, selecting a provider that enables services to be deployed privately and securely in a way that never touches the public internet is the customer’s safest route. Innovative deployment models allow these solutions to be directly tied into customers’ existing infrastructure via secure MPLS, Metro Ethernet, or VPN, as well as direct cross-connects at major PoPs.

First Communications is excited to offer customers the best of both worlds when it comes to colocation and interconnection. First Communications is able to provide direct access to customized, highly available and fully managed services as well as Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud via secure cross-connects with the lowest latency. Combining reliable physical infrastructure, redundancy and physical security with our managed services and vast connectivity options, we provide businesses with all of the necessary requirements of an effective colocation deployment.

By: Lisa Sons, Product Manager