Why Put Colocation Providers at the Center of Your Cloud Strategy

September 26, 2019

As your business’ cloud strategy evolves to meet changing needs in the digital age, leading colocation providers have also evolved to respond to meet those needs. Colocation use continues to grow because leading providers are increasing their integrated solution offerings in ways that change the use dynamic from “cloud or colocation” to “cloud and colocation.”

We can trace this change to the continued growth of hybrid and multicloud strategies making up a crucial part of the framework of digital business needs evolution. The growth is most apparent in Gartner’s prediction that over 75 percent of midsize and large organizations will have adopted either a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy by 2021.

Some things remain constant in a business’s evolving cloud strategy. An example is the highly predictable workloads with consistent utilization benefiting from lower operating costs in a colocation data center.

On the other end of the spectrum are workloads and applications that are constantly evolving in terms of access, storage, compute, and security needs where a private cloud may be more helpful. Even public cloud workloads can evolve to where it cost more to use public cloud storage than to house them in private cloud storage.

Since most businesses are looking for ways to get out of the data center ownership business, colocation provides the flexibility of need with these evolving workload cost, security, and access structures. Colocation providers have evolved to deliver cost-effective private cloud options and management services to take the Capex and operational burden off IT and the organization.

This often translates to providing a cost-effective home for those applications and workloads that have become too expensive to operate in the public cloud. The combination of changing access, security, performance needs, and cost structures of workloads leads to an ongoing need for repatriation.

Eighty percent of respondents to a recent IDC survey report repatriating workloads from public to private cloud environments for increased security, performance and control. Repatriation and colocation work together within a cloud strategy that emphasizes tighter centralized control and defined approval processes that help reduce shadow IT. This comes at a time where departments are working outside of the sight of the IT organization to apportion unsanctioned public cloud spends. This unsanctioned scale creep of cloud use leads to costs that the company must still pay but has little control over.

The colocation data center can now provide businesses with everything they need to construct hybrid cloud environments without having to budget for the cost of in-house data centers. This starts with the ability to have numerous private servers managed and maintained by an experienced colocation provider. These colocation providers can also deliver broad interconnectivity services so public and private clouds can be fully integrated in a hybrid strategy.

Colocation providers also enable organizations to meld hybrid and multi-cloud strategies as businesses require the use of several different cloud providers to meet varied workload and data needs. Leading Los Angeles Colocation providers are a perfect example of how they meet complex business needs as a central part of an organization’s cloud strategy. This includes connectivity, services, access, storage, and network performance optimization.

Integration and interconnection are vital to businesses operating globally in the age of digital transformation. This leads to more business functions beyond the network edge and in diverse locations. Colocation data center providers are enabling edge computing for data center networks that can reach everywhere, interconnect everyone and integrate everything. Their mission is high speed, low latency, dedicated interconnection, and connections to cloud providers that bypass the public internet to increase performance and security.

It’s clear to you that your cloud strategy must continually evolve to meet changing needs. With leading colocation providers as part of the strategy, you have a partner capable of delivering the flexibility, adaptability, consistency and cost savings to meet those changing needs—now and in the future.