Managed colocation is a service that enables organizations to lease out space in a colocation center to house their hardware – and essentially leave the rest to the colocation provider. With managed colocation, the provider will take care of the set-up as well as day-to-day management and maintenance of critical infrastructure. This includes rack and cable management, monitoring, power and cooling expertise and taking care of any additions or migrations when necessary.
TRG Datacenters are managed colocation experts. As a baseline, our Houston Colocation facility provides a fault tolerant environment for your colocation needs along with free remote hands 24/7, and free cross connects. But we also offer much more than that. For customers who want a fully managed colocation service we have Colo+. With our managed colocation services, we can manage the migration overnight within 12 hours (even on a Friday night), we have a unique rack and cabling system designed to eliminate operational risk from day 1, and all adds, moves and changes are included, so you can focus on innovating and driving core operations in your business.
Let’s take a look at how managed colocation stacks up against other modes of datacenter service.
Managed Colocation vs. Traditional Colocation
With traditional colocation, clients get secured physical space, power, and network connectivity — and that’s it. You get reliable infrastructure but the burden of managing and maintaining IT systems is still on your shoulders.
Managed colocation, on the other hand, includes expert IT management along with physical resources. With the right colocation center, managed colocation ensures operational efficiency and system uptime without taxing internal resources as much as traditional colocation.
There are benefits and drawbacks of both types of service. On the one hand, fully managed services have more upfront expenses than traditional colocation and might offer less control for some clients, depending on their IT activities. On the other hand, traditional colocation requires more resources to be devoted to infrastructure management. Even if you already have these resources within your business, traditional colocation can still end up costing more in the long run. Ultimately, the choice depends on your organization’s fiscal flexibility, in-house expertise, and strategic inclination towards IT management.
Managed Colocation vs. On-Premises
Managing an on-premises data center gives you total control over your IT infrastructure. However, on-premises is expensive and demanding of talent, knowledge, and time. Your administrators need to constantly stay informed about the complex and ever-changing world of networking technology and processes, necessitating a continual investment in training and certifications. For many legacy giants, on-premises is just how they’ve always done it. For most others, the cloud or colocation are more pragmatic solutions.
Managed colocation is almost at the other end of the scale to an on-premises data center. Not only does it involve moving all the physical hardware to another location, but it also means offloading all of the day-to-day management to specialists.
Managed Colocation vs. Cloud-Based Service
Cloud services have proliferated over the last two decades. Many clients choose to keep their data in the cloud because these services scale easily and offer pay-as-you-go pricing. However, cloud-based services can also suffer poor data control, security and even data transfer delays due to latency.
Managed colocation gives faster data access and lower latency, particularly for organizations that are geographically close to the facility. Moreover, a dedicated infrastructure ensures that resources such as bandwidth are not shared with other organizations, negating the “noisy neighbor” issue prevalent in cloud services.
Click here if you’d like to know more about cloud vs colocation.
Managed Colocation Service Models
Managed colocation can be structured in various ways to cater to the specific needs of the organization. Here are some different service models:
- Fully managed: The colocation provider takes care of all aspects of infrastructure management, including software updates, security, network management, and backup and recovery.
- Partially managed: The colocation provider manages specific aspects of the customer’s IT infrastructure while others are managed in-house. For example, the colocation provider manages network services, but the customer maintains control over hardware and software management.
- Hybrid colocation: A blend of colocation services and cloud solutions.
- Remote hands services: The colocation provider offers on-site technical assistance for all tasks that the client cannot perform remotely, like hardware replacements, cable management, and rebooting servers.
- Performance-oriented: This takes high-performance computing, network optimization, and minimal latency as benchmarks for success. Services for a performance-oriented service to focus on include high-speed connections, dynamic bandwidth management, and prioritized network performance.
- Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): Data integrity and minimal downtime are important to all businesses, but DraSS is for use-cases where even minimal downtime or data loss could have severe financial and operational implications. DRaaS is focused on robust data recovery solutions, like more frequent backups, faster data restoration, or even a seamless failover to a secondary site in the event of a disaster.
- Security-first: This involves advanced cybersecurity measures, physical security protocols, and frequent security auditing, for businesses that are especially vulnerable or frequent targets of cyberattack.
- Compliance-centric: Tailored for businesses that need to adhere to stringent regulatory and compliance standards. Ensures data management and security adheres to specific industry regulations.
Of course, these service models are not set in stone. At TRG datacenters, we take a consultative approach to so you can be sure you get the right deployment type for your business.
The Benefits of Managed Colocation
These days, businesses trying to find the best solution to their data storage woes are faced with a dizzying array of options. From traditional on-premises centers to cloud-based solutions to colocation – each has its own set of challenges and merits.
Managed colocation is a solution that combines the best of all worlds: the physical assurance of traditional colocation, the hands-off convenience of cloud-based services, and the versatility of on-premises. In today’s dynamic digital era, such a holistic approach can be the cornerstone of operational success.
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