TALKING

As such , it is playing a unique and increasingly vital role in helping organisations build or strengthen their cloudled business credentials . This is especially true in the area of business-critical application deployment .

It ’ s a trend that is intensifying as businesses prepare for post-pandemic economic recovery and growth and rethink what agility really means . Rather than going ‘ all in ’ with cloud , they ’ re viewing colocation as a powerful alternative that offers significant advantages for any enterprise looking to underpin a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model .

Cost-effective agility and performance – with no loss of control

In a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model , colocation empowers businesses to deploy critical applications and workloads from a highly available , highly secure data centre . By enabling their workloads to access public and private cloud environments via the data centre , companies are able to benefit from the agility , resiliency and connectivity of the cloud without losing technical control or incurring the costs associated with creating their own data centre .

Indeed , deploying business-critical apps from a colocation facility represents a win-win on a number of fronts . Compared to deploying on-premises , organisations get to benefit from all the availability , power , cooling and networking they ’ ll need with none of the associated overheads .

Similarly , scaling with a public cloud can prove an expensive proposition . Worse still , these environments can often struggle to cope with the workload demand peaks of core business apps . By utilising colocation , organisations are able to prioritise performance – including availability and latency – for their critical apps while continuing to deploy lower-level functions via a public cloud as needed .

Finally , while private clouds may be an excellent choice for delivering the high customisation and performance organisations need for business critical apps , their made-to-measure approach is notoriously expensive . However , colocation facilities give organisations access to a flexible and highly customisable infrastructure that makes it possible to deploy and retain control over servers without having to invest in bespoke architecture .

Data sovereignty and regulatory management

Recent research reveals that organisations are also switching to colocation to enable cloud performance and scalability , while controlling data integrity . That ’ s because colocation allows data to be stored and managed much closer to their hosting solution , network and cybersecurity . This means that organisations are able to address data sovereignty concerns without compromising their multi-cloud strategies .

This is important for multiple reasons . Firstly , advancing Digital Transformation often involves the rapid expansion of digital estates and navigating rapidly evolving privacy laws . So technical control and accessibility will be essential to reduce the risk of data loss , silos and non-compliance .

Additionally , many organisations now find themselves subject to post-Brexit regulations that prevent them from processing data outside the country it is generated in , which effectively rules out public cloud . Unlike colocation facilities , which allow for easy location data audits , public cloud or third-party private

Liam Taylor , Head of Data Centre Operations at Node4

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