Meeting Evolving Digital Transformation Business Needs with the Colocation Data Center
June 24, 2019As the computer and data storage needs of enterprises and SMBs constantly change in the digital age, it forces the colocation data center to evolve its services and approach to stay one step ahead of those changes. For example, unlocking the actionable power within the data of IoT through analytics, HPC and AI is quickly becoming a necessity for companies of all sizes rather than the province of the largest enterprises. The challenge has always been in developing these data center environments and meeting the untenable costs of doing so.
Colocation service providers are evolving to meet the needs of HPC for financial services, manufacturing, retail, oil & gas, pharmaceuticals and others where buying space in a colocation data center is becoming a viable option. Several leading colocation data center providers are now uniquely positioned to provide the power density and services these companies need to move these workloads offsite.
Equally important is the broad connectivity options they can bring to bear for cost-effectively moving HPC workloads to off-premises data centers. The connectivity and cloud adoption link provides choices that enable them to deliver options for integrated hybrid architectures. Cost effective and scalable access to these choices can provide highly flexible customization for moving and processing data in the data center, the loud and beyond the network’s edge.
IoT strategies bring transport and scalability challenges due to the massive amounts of data that must be gathered, moved, accessed, and analyzed, often in real time from locations across the globe. To meet these challenges, enterprises are turning to edge computing options with support from colocation service providers to deal with the compute and data storage location and latency issues by positioning more resources closer to the devices.
An IDC FutureScape Report predicted that 2019 will be the year that at Least 40 percent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge of, the network. This acceleration will continue as more businesses explore how IoT opens new business lines with the support of colocation data center providers.
Today’s colocation data center can deliver the connectivity options to enable IoT sensor data collection through edge computing architectures via a hybrid network of data centers as well as public and private cloud provider configurations. Services are also making the colocation data center far more attractive in the IoT age with Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) options that make local siting of required resources much easier.
DCaaS is made possible through offsite data center facilities that can be leased by clients. This gives business clients the access to physical space and security, rack installations, bandwidth, power, cooling as well as storage, server, networking, and other hardware from the DCaaS provider.
The DCaaS concept is part of the evolution of colocation data center providers that must adapt to support the on-demand resource-provisioning requirements of agile businesses in the digital age. Businesses that deliver IoT-enabled services and products can keep a comparable level of control to on-premise data centers without the associated CapEx.
Third party maintenance and support from colocation service providers can be crucial to a hybrid environment where assets and applications are spread over a more diverse landscape. As IT budgets become even more stretched, IT organizations are being pressured to provide even more diverse services.
The colocation data center can maximize uptime, increase storage options, relieve internal staff, and help businesses move to a manageable OpEx compute and storage model. This enables the business to focus on strategic objectives that are centered on digital transformation for present and future operational and financial success.