The debate over whether cloud solutions and colocation are complimentary or competitive has been at the forefront for quite some time, intensified by the growing dominance of cloud technologies over the past decade.
With a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure, the demand for cloud solutions skyrocketed with the onset of the pandemic, as companies accelerated their transition to remote work and a plethora of new digital operations and services. As organizations reassess their priorities and cost bases, evaluating how best to scale infrastructure capacity for today’s increasingly data-centric and digitized operations, the search for an optimized way to support mission-critical workloads, while simultaneously reducing IT costs, intensifies.
Opting for a middle path – hybrid
It’s not surprising that this is reigniting discussions about what’s better, cloud or colocation, in terms of adapting to future challenges and an evolving IT landscape. The issue is that the choice is not as clear-cut as it might seem. This is because data centers are rapidly evolving to become a feature in a much broader and complex environment, typically distributed across multiple locations and containing both on-premises and off-premises facilities.
This means that colocation providers are also evolving rapidly. They are no longer limited to providing data center facilities that only provide floor space, power, and an internet connection; many now offer a range of services, from managed IT to hybrid cloud. And some offer direct connections to public cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In other words, today you can have both colocation and cloud. It’s no longer an either-or choice. In fact, for many organizations, opting for a hybrid infrastructure allows them to create the right mix of cloud and traditional IT to meet their needs.
The housing is evolving – rapidly
Data centers are rapidly evolving to offer high-performance colocation facilities with customized solutions designed to address changing customer demands. Many companies are now looking to mix and match public and hybrid cloud models with their colocation data center environments to balance the need for secure and stable production infrastructure with a growing requirement for agility and high-performance computing.
For businesses, there are numerous positive gains from adopting a hybrid approach to their IT ecosystems. While many workloads may perform better in the cloud, the cloud is not always cost-effective for applications where demand is predictable and stable. Additionally, the cloud does not always provide the high performance needed for AI, machine learning, or real-time data analytics. All of which make colocation the ideal choice for applications that require compute-intensive resources and low-latency response times. Furthermore, colocation also offers significant benefits in terms of data sovereignty, security, and privacy regulations.
As a result, companies are now turning to colocation as a means to locate and manage data closer to their cloud, network, and security functions, while enabling affordable public cloud and hyper-converged systems that can be closely managed and controlled. This, in turn, means they are increasingly relying on colocation providers to support and monitor their systems, and provisioning state, in real-time.
Meeting changing customer needs
More and more IT leaders are looking to reap the benefits of combining colocation with the cloud to select the best mix, from a plethora of infrastructure options, to meet their evolving business and workload needs. This means that colocation providers now need to offer increasingly sophisticated connectivity options and network services to address the operational realities of these hybrid ecosystems. Along with enabling secure and direct connections to public clouds, this includes deploying tools that will provide the intelligence needed to ensure that all elements of their customers’ infrastructure are working in harmony.
With Gartner predicting that by 2025, 85% of enterprise infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud, and edge delivery options, compared to 20% in 2020, one thing is clear. The increasing interconnections with cloud services will be critical to accelerating businesses’ access to the edge of their networks, so they can deliver faster services with lower latency. As colocation providers evolve to work with all cloud options, and customers’ increasingly sophisticated data requirements, connectivity services are set to become a defining competitive differentiator.