Networks Europe May/June 2019 | Page 14

14 COLOCATION Business benefits of colocation by Ben Brown, 4D Data Centres www.4d-dc.com Lots of things can conspire to slow business expansion, and one of the biggest brakes on growth is IT When your business reaches a certain size, you tend to end up with a lot of budget and resource tied up in housing, managing and maintaining your servers. That’s budget and resource that, in an ideal world, you could release to re-invest in growth initiatives. You might think that a growing IT estate is a necessary cost of being an expanding and successful business. But actually, there’s a very simple strategy to reduce those levels of cost and resource and free your business to grow. It’s called colocation, and we’re going to look at four ways it can help you achieve your business goals. What is colocation? Colocation is when you install your servers in a professionally managed data centre, rather than on your own premises. So instead of having to find space in your own building, pay for expensive cooling, and handle the maintenance of your servers, you pay an external provider to do it for you as part of a colocation service. High-speed network connections between your premises and their data centre give you rapid access to your servers www.networkseuropemagazine.com