Technology

Colocation vs Cloud: What’s the Difference and Which Is Right for Your Business?

Did you know that the global cloud storage market is predicted to grow from $50.1 billion in 2020 to $137.3 billion in 2025? This shows the increasing volumes of data that are being produced across enterprises. And the rising need to provide access to said data for employees and customers.

But cloud services aren’t the only way to store data – there are also colocation data services. 

You might be wondering what is colocation? And should you be choosing colocation vs cloud? Let’s read on to see the difference between the two and whether your choice should be cloud or colocation. 

What Is Colocation?

If you have already made a significant investment in physical IT infrastructure as a business, then you will probably use colocation services where you rent out space in a third-party data center and place your equipment in their facility. Why would you do this?

Well, storing and operating IT equipment requires a dedicated server room or a private data center facility. Not only that but these facilities require great resources in terms of power and tremendous cooling requirements to keep everything running optimally. 

Perhaps you are not interested in spending additional resources on taking care of your equipment and would prefer someone else to do it. Colocation data services will take care of all this for you. 

Colocation vs Cloud – Which One to Choose?

Cloud services, on the other hand, are when you don’t have the physical infrastructure already and would like to rent space in a server that’s virtual. Once you rent these virtual servers, you can transfer data from physical data servers to these virtual ones and thus, hand over the day-to-day infrastructure management to the cloud providers. 

This can free up your IT department to focus on more strategic responsibilities. 

As you can see, both colocation and cloud services are a way for you to free up your current IT team to focus on something else rather than taking care of physical data servers or virtual ones. 

But it differs on where you start. If you have physical equipment already, you might choose colocation data services. If not, then you would go for cloud services. 

There are some companies though that choose both – hybrid cloud. This is when public and private cloud environments. This is where you have both on-premise or colocation data servers and public clouds. This way you can transfer information between the two easily and be more agile, secure, and cost-effective. 

Going for Cloud or Colocation Will Depend On Your Business Needs

As you can see, the decision isn’t easy and has to be made with due diligence. The decision between colocation vs cloud will depend on a wide variety of factors, including what your current cloud model is, where do you see your business going in the future, how big your current IT department is, and how much of their time do you want to free up. 

If you wish to learn more about IT infrastructure and business technology, please keep browsing our website.

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