Colocation, We Did It For The Infrastructure
Sometimes the want to outsource your data centre is based solely on infrastructure. Even with a crack IT team, the biggest, messiest and sometimes the most costly portion of that team is the physical plant portion. Electrical supply distribution, back up and maintenance coupled with the mechanical manipulations that occur all too often are a major chunk of money and real estate space.
Fire detection, fire suppression and leak detection systems while critical to the data centre operation, are not critical to be required to be under your direct control. Your software and application management need to be at your fingertips and with the right network connections and supervisory software they will be, no matter where your colocation racks of equipment reside. If colocation is even in your thought process at all it should be at the data centre infrastructure colocation level at minimum.
With the outsourcing, or offloading, of the physical plant equipment, you can also loose a few other concerns with it such as building and equipment security. You will also loose the connectivity concern, as the better colocation providers do a much better job of consolidating network resources than could ever hope for in-house. Let your application get the focus of your attention. After all it is the money maker, all the backroom stuff that keeps it running is the real expense, so cut it to the bone.
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