on the cover
A Moving Experience
As our production of data continues to snowball, many organisations are seeking solace in colocation.
But how do you know if colocation is the right move for you? Kevin Kivlochan, co-founder and sales and
marketing director at ONI, walks us through what it’s all about, the benefits and what to consider when
choosing that all important colocation provider.
C
olocation is often over
simplified as merely
renting space from a data
centre service provider, to
house servers and storage.
However, colocation involves more
than simply renting anything from
a rack to a room.
A colocation agreement will
include more than the physical
space to house your equipment;
it will include power and cooling,
connectivity, redundancy, physical
security and, increasingly, a range
of professional and managed
service offerings to support your IT
and business needs.
12 | September 2017
Colocation and the cloud
Colocation is often seen as the first
step towards cloud adoption, where
an organisation moves elements
of its IT infrastructure off-premise.
The migration of services from
on-premise to third-party data
centre facilities has been driven by
a number of key factors. Principal
among them have been the
evolution of business IT demands,
the emergence of enterprise-class
data centre services and the ever-
present need to lower costs.
On their journey to the cloud,
many organisations choose to adopt
a hybrid infrastructure. One that
frequently includes an element of
colocation. The reasons why are
obvious, not only are you moving to a
state-of-the-art data centre facility –
benefiting from all the connectivity,
resilience, security etc. that comes
from your service provider’s
investment in the latest technologies
to support enterprise cloud services
– but you are also able to sweat your
current investment in IT – prolonging
its useful life.
When equipment goes end of
life you can transition to a utility
based cloud service from within the
same, familiar, secure environment.
Or, you can scale your computing