5 Ways Colocation Supports Businesses and Their Remote Employees

How can colocation support businesses with remote employees. Find out,

December 2, 2022

The first frontier in digital transformation lies in the data center, where data, network, and compute reside. IT leaders have never had it better and more challenging at the same time because there are so many paths for hosting distributed IT infrastructure. In the first part of this explainer on colocation, Scott Gould, VP of business operations at Element Critical, discussed how colocation could help deliver business value. Here, he focuses on five active ways in which colocation supports businesses and remote work.

As cloud farms out an application and system complexity, colocation allows businesses to remain in control of equipment, applications, and network while relieving the stress of building operations, power foundations, and support services. 

Rather than invest and update an on-premises data center or IT Space, a colocation environment provides businesses with flexible, scalable space and enterprise-level redundancy. Enlisting the services of a trusted colocation data center partner can boost success measures for companies that are supporting remote employees. Organizations that are also digitizing more business processes will benefit from the stability, security, and design of a data center built for modern business. 

Here are five ways that colocation can support businesses and their distributed workforces.

1. Robust Data Center Infrastructure Management

The bottom line is that running your own data center in-house is hard. Businesses operating their own private data center assume tremendous risk and capital expense. Not to mention expansive IT and engineering teams must remain on staff to keep the facility running. 

Companies that can shift to fully remote workers or reduce office space will continue to have data and applications that must be secured somewhere. By outsourcing to colocation, businesses no longer need to worry about generator contracts, scaling the UPS system for backup battery, building security, networking buildouts, and beyond. A significant percentage of the IT team’s struggles are relieved with a data center that meets N+1 and 2N capabilities and has a proven history of uptime capability. The partnership delivers automatic teams in place to manage battery contracts, equipment warranties, environmental compliance, ASHRAE standards, and so much more.

Enterprise-grade colocation data center infrastructure offers modern and efficient technology that controls costs for customers and often exceeds the standard of privately run facilities. Dedicated facility teams providing around-the-clock management also deliver remote hands support, eliminating the need to keep IT staff on call 24×7 to troubleshoot.

2. Improved Interconnection Solutions

Given that office complexes are generally served by only a single carrier, suppose a business would like to expand its carrier selection. In that case, they must incur significant costs to deliver carriers’ last-mile fiber into their building and sacrifice the physical space to house them. In contrast, colocation data centers are carrier neutral and have greater flexibility in the choices of network products.  

Data centers offer connectivity through multiple internet service providers and direct connections with top cloud providers, all in a single location within their meet-me-rooms. The seamless connection to local/national networks and cloud on-ramps to connect cloud-based workloads ensures that businesses can always stay connected and access the data and applications they need, even when working remotely. 

With so many interconnection options, colocation serves as a foundational hub for mission-critical IT resources by delivering reliable network solutions to interconnect various applications. A business can also securely connect one colocation facility to another or its headquarters to the colocation facility and then tie it into its cloud applications. Collocated workloads can also be connected to multiple providers over diverse fiber resources – avoiding network outages with highly redundant fiber optic networks. 

Optimized network security delivers further benefits. Private network connections ensure organizations have full access to all the bandwidth required without fighting for pipe on the public internet. Companies can use data centers to set up virtual private networks (VPNs), allowing for secure communication between employees working remotely. This helps keep businesses’ data and applications safe from potential threats remotely and physically, especially when a company is reducing the number of staff coming into the office.

See More: How Low Code Platform Accelerates Digital Transformation

3. Greater Efficiency

As business leaders look for ways to overturn previous barriers and adopt a new normal when it comes to workplace flexibility, what is really happening is that businesses are evolving. Their data centers must evolve as well.

As the next step to transitioning to remote or hybrid work models, businesses must re-examine their IT infrastructure solutions. Perhaps they aim to consolidate environments while maintaining tight SLAs and reasonable cost models. Perhaps some workflows require dedicated connections between the cloud and their foundational IT infrastructure. Delivering on these objectives is no easy feat when operating an in-house data center. 

All companies require space for their core IT equipment; heat is the server’s greatest enemy in that space. Whether server environments are production and test development servers, database and application storage, network and security, or backup devices, a high-efficiency environment delivers performance and longevity for equipment and compute. 

Quality colocation facilities make sophisticated modern cooling and power efficiency part of the package, delivering stability to the IT budget. Inefficient cooling reduces the longevity of hardware by the hour when computing occurs in sub-optimal or non-ASHRAE standards. In the same vein, clean, reliable, stable power is the lifeblood of IT infrastructure. Surges, brownouts, blackouts, and overloads can cause critical data systems and components to fail. 

Colocation provides enterprise-grade UPS capacitor systems and balanced power delivery to client environments with impressive scale and quickness. Backed up by power conditioning hardware, systems will stay safe from the peaks and valleys of commercial power disruptions. 

All of these systems, commercial power, transformers, ATS/STS, and UPS system are tied to multimillion-dollar generators capable of generating megawatts of replacement power – delivering the greatest protection possible to critical systems. The factor of power, cooling, and backup equipment efficiency no longer varies when leveraging trusted colocation partners. 

4. Enhanced Security

Transitions to the office complex when workers empty offices can definitely spell changes for on-premise data centers. Yet it also provides an opportunity for IT departments to prioritize the physical infrastructure security for businesses’ critical data – especially when companies reduce the staff coming into the office. 

Rather than developing new protocols to protect IT equipment, IT managers can place their equipment in highly secure colocation facilities with extensive physical security measures and robust backup solutions to protect mission-critical applications. Colocation facilities have tight security and compliance protocols to protect against physical threats and safely secure sensitive data. 

Security measures include perimeter fencing, CCTV monitoring, biometric access control systems and mantraps, 2-stage dry-pipe, localized and dedicated fire systems, NOC security oversight, and 24/7 on-site security guards and engineering teams. IT departments are better equipped to innovate solutions when trusted colocation providers handle these and more aspects.

5. Business Continuity Reinforcements

A colocation provider’s primary focus is to ensure the facility is robust. Wherever businesses locate their critical data, one thing remains paramount – essential data and applications need to be available, which translates into uptime. Redundant power architectures and cooling systems, network diversity, disaster protocols, the facility team’s expertise, and regimented compliance standards keep the data available no matter what happens. Whether colocation is leveraged for full hot-site backup, disaster recovery as a service, or primary storage and compute, colocation data centers have versatile and practiced solutions to power businesses through disasters. 

Organizations that support remote or hybrid workplaces should consider colocation services a necessity. At its core function, colocation delivers reliable infrastructure with cost-effective carrier and cloud connectivity. Yet having reinforcements in place also unleashes IT teams to drive IT strategy focused on business outcomes rather than technology hosting. The IT teams can rest assured knowing they can physically access servers and digitally log into systems hosted on servers without coming to the headquarters.

A New Era for Data Center Flexibility and Workplace Versatility

The shift to flexible workspaces and home-based work is a move toward greater flexibility and freedom. The new workplace also comes at a time in technology evolution when vast amounts of data are generated at the networks’ edge. As businesses continue to diversify their IT strategy, the services provided by a reliable colocation data center offer the flexibility and geographic proximity to achieve true digital transformation so businesses can get the most out of their data in a hybrid environment here and now.       

How are you benefiting from colocation and new technologies that improve versatility? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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Scott Gould
Scott Gould

VP of Business Operations, Element Critical

Scott Gould is a strategic leader with twenty years of experience maximizing business results and P&L improvement through process transformation, development of supply chain strategies and driving standardization. As Vice President of Business Operations at Element Critical, Scott oversees strategic initiatives to ensure the development and implementation of processes to meet current and future needs while continuing to deliver high-performance and operationally efficient data center facilities.
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