The role of colocation – from pandemic response to cloud adoption
As digital transformation accelerates and industries reshape themselves in response to the pandemic, IT and Facilities teams are under pressure to keep pace. The situation is very neatly summarised by Gartner:
“IT leaders today are dealing with competing objectives: To keep the lights on — running mission-critical applications while protecting the business from outages — and to enable the business to react to market changes quickly and adopt new technologies or services when they need them (not necessarily when IT is ready or has the cash to spend on them).”
Combined with the ongoing shift to hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies, the typical infrastructure is becoming increasingly diverse. Colocation is playing an important role in this mix. Our whitepaper, The Five S’s You Need From Your Colocation Provider, provides further insight into finding the right colocation partner for your organisation’s infrastructure changes.
Why colocation?
The ability to scale and connect are two essential building blocks for businesses – and not just those on the leading edge of IT strategy. These are capabilities that the majority of organisations will have to adopt in the near future. Data proliferation, the increased use of applications and new modes of working mean that the size and shape of the typical infrastructure is becoming less predictable. Colocation therefore provides answers to many of today’s data center questions.
The traditional benefit of OpEx rather than CapEx investment is popular in this risk averse market. But looking through a more optimistic lens, colocation also supports the rapid scaling of your infrastructure, and potential access to multiple clouds. With power, cooling, connectivity and monitoring all optimised for digital business, IT teams can deliver the performance they need, but which they often cannot extract from their own data centre. At the same time colocation enables you to go beyond your own walls to achieve interconnection to potentially numerous different clouds – both public and private.
An additional advantage that colocation can provide is in improving your environmental footprint. Sustainable practices are increasingly important in most sectors. For individual organisations this means adopting new processes and scrutinising your supply chain – and as digital transformation drives greater infrastructure requirements, IT is firmly under the environmental spotlight. Colocation can support a sustainable ethos by being not just compliant, but proactive, in relation to core environmental legislation and best practice.
Download our white paper to learn more about colocation
How DATA4 helps answer your challenges
DATA4’s data center campuses provide a complete facility, technology and service ecosystem to support our customers as their infrastructure needs evolve. We provide secure, scalable and high-performance data hosting solutions, and each of our facilities has connectivity at its heart. Our data centers give customers seamless connection to the critical carriers within the private and public cloud landscape, and we provide access to multiple carriers across our various data centers through resilient fiber connectivity.
DATA4 owns and operates 21 data centers across France, Italy, Spain and Luxembourg, along with a land bank of 129 hectares and power reserve of 209 MW. In addition to this unique footprint within the European market, we are also a leader in digital responsibility. DATA4 Group has developed an ambitious programme of commitments that span the environment, human resources, a sustainable digital strategy and the support of our local ecosystem.
DATA4 enables customers to build hybrid architectures that span their own data centers, private clouds, our campus ecosystem and the public cloud. Find out more about how we can support you as your business transforms.
