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4 Real Life Business Benefits of Colocation
Since the pandemic started, people all over the world started spending at least 35% more time at home than usual. It’s no surprise that in light of this, markets and customer behavior have changed.
Online shopping has never been as prevalent as it is today. Services such as consultations with doctors, lawyers, health professionals and business consultants, are now delivered online, and video calls have finally become an acceptable medium for professional service delivery.
With these pivotal consumer trends, the way we work has inevitably changed as well today and in the near foreseeable future.
From an operations perspective, companies and service providers must establish the necessary structure and resources to connect with the entire workforce, accomplish workloads and maintain important business and social connections and obligations.
Providing 24/7 IT management and support are crucial not only for internal but also for customer-facing engagements. On top of this, security is of utmost important, as hackers will try to take advantage of the wider surface area of attack with the current remote work environment.
That said, how can organizations sustainably fulfill these crucial and long-term business requirements?
Outsourcing your IT needs may provide answers.
Additional hands, or “remote” hands, can definitely help manage growing IT demands and complexities as your company prepare for an uncertain future.
And one such example is outsourcing your data center operations to a third-party data center colocation service provider.
But first, what is colocation? Colocation is when you install your servers in a professionally-managed, world-class data center, rather than on your own premises.
Instead of having to find or rent expensive real estate space in your own building, pay for expensive cooling, and handle the massive task of maintaining your servers, you engage an external provider to do it for you as part of a business colocation service.
High speed and managed network connections between your premises and their data center gives you fast and easy access to your servers and storage, just as if they were installed in your own office.
In fact, enterprises have been including colocation strategy as a major component of their business transformation, and more so during the pandemic, and in doing so, they enjoy the following benefits and capabilities:
Ensure that Mission Critical Business Applications are up and running at all times
It is important that your valued business applications like website and your core business software, are running at its peak and optimum performance. However, unwanted and unpredictable things can happen in your server room that can disrupt your operations like power outages, UPS backups run dry, servers can suddenly go slow, your technical personnel might be pre-occupied with other urgent matters or may be unavailable.
By collocating in a world-class data center, you’re installing your servers in a professionally managed environment, increasing their uptime and reliability.
For instance, your mission-critical core applications can be collocated in ePLDT’s VITRO Data Centers, which provides 99.99% SLA, and access to any telco of your choice be it local or international. It is likewise manned by technical experts with over 20 years of data center experience.
ePLDT also maintains 99 certified engineers that hold 63 different industry relevant certifications, in other words, these are technical expertise that are within your reach and massive bandwidth that your business can consume.
Enjoy greater bandwidth and connectivity options
Data center colocation service providers offer a broad range of connectivity options to its clients. With multiple internet service providers, cloud environments and other cross connections available, companies can fully optimize their workloads and improve IT operational flexibility.
Ensure that data is secured by leveraging on the superior physical security provided by data center service providers
Offload the security and compliance burden to a data center colocation service provider with their data security expertise – and avoid the risks of non-compliance or a costly data breach.
Aside from just shifting responsibilities, data center facilities can completely transform your security given their multiple capabilities which includes round-the-clock security protecting the building, locked cabinets and alarms to keep individual racks safe, video surveillance, man-traps and top-of-the-line firewalls and encryption (additional services) to protect your data and simplify compliance.
Free up precious budget and instead, invest in what really matters – your company’s growth
Maintaining on-site servers can be one of the largest cost centers for a growing business. From employing skilled technicians and powering your servers, to ensuring they’re kept at a steady temperature, on-site servers can demand a high budget – preventing you from investing in other key growth areas.
In fact, based on research, powering and cooling your on-premise data center is a huge drain on businesses globally. On the average, a single on-premise rack set-up which an assumed consumption of 4KW and running 24×7 can cost P52,000 a month worth of power and cooling alone. This excludes prime real-estate cost, security measures and technical personnel to monitor and maintain it.
Also, expanding your business often means you need to find more space to house your growing team. Looking for new premises can be costly and disruptive – even assuming you can easily find somewhere suitable.
But if you have a room or floor that’s currently housing your IT equipment, colocation can enable you to free up that space for more people, more storage or more facilities.
You’ll save on the costs of finding and moving to new premises – as well as enjoying all of the additional cost savings that come from moving your IT infrastructure offsite.
By collocating your infrastructure in an external data center, you can avoid many of these costs while still having the IT resources you need to grow.
The good news is that ePLDT can help you in evaluating and jointly determining which essential component of your IT ecosystem can be outsourced by a trusted partner for growth or be reinforced further as you go through your transformation journey.
To learn more about how we can be of assistance, please click this link and expect feedback within 24 to 48 hours.
