Colocation must coexist with cloud
Mike Bennett says colo will continue to help organisations prepare for new, emerging situations
Contrary to what some pure-play colocation providers may say, colocation can and should coexist with cloud.
The danger is in thinking of colo and cloud as an "either/or" debate focused on costs. Pure-play providers may argue this one out, but it misses the point: colo and cloud work best together.
The Vanson Bourne 2013 State of IT Report found that IT leaders expect to outsource nearly 70 per cent of their IT infrastructure workloads by 2018. This is a drastic turnaround from today, where 65 per cent of IT infrastructure globally (60 per cent in the UK) resides in in-house environments.
The study shows that colocation is widely expected to be the environment of choice for many over the next two years, acting as the building block for the enterprise migration to managed hosting and cloud.
To assume this five-year migration involves a direct shift from on-premise to cloud would be to disregard the very drivers of colocation: the need for IT infrastructure in a way that contains costs while promoting business growth.
Email and web applications may be easier to migrate to the cloud, but finance and ERP systems might need to rest on private infrastructure for compliance reasons in certain industries or countries.
Having a hybrid approach, utilising colocation, allows organisations to match differing workloads with differing infrastructure parameters in the most efficient environment possible, meeting performance metrics unique to each application.
As the world changes, so does the role of colocation. Colocation has an invaluable role in handling the amount of data in the world, which is growing exponentially. Large, complex IT environments that support massive data troves require an enormous amount of power to fuel everything, so it is no surprise businesses turn to full-service colocation providers to help them bring order and life to their data.
It's no longer just about what is in a datacentre, but who is in the datacentre. Businesses are looking at how relationships with others inside the shared datacentre can support their high-level objectives.
Through simple cross-connects, for example, companies can build their own services and offerings by connecting to respective partners and suppliers located in the same space. Hardware, cooling and other facility considerations are still very relevant today, but organisations are also moving towards conceptual, strategic needs that colocation can help with.
Security has always been a concern for IT decision makers, and unsurprisingly it was the single biggest concern in a study we did recently. Colocation can help in this area.
How many in-house IT teams can keep up with new and emerging threats, let alone the capital expense of security measures such as closed circuit cameras, on-site security and so on?
IT trends will continue to drive the way businesses approach IT outsourcing. However, the benefits of colocation: cost savings, security and proven uptime, backed by stringent SLAs, will ensure its survival for the foreseeable future, while also helping organisations prepare for new, emerging needs.
Mike Bennett is vice president of global datacentre acquisition and expansion at Savvis