8 pros and cons of colocation

Depending on how much space an organization needs, admins can rent out colocation space 1. The facility itself, power distribution and redundancy, cooling, security and physical connectivity are all covered. Your basic payments to the operator cover the costs of operating and maintaining the facility, along with providing sufficient clean power to operate all your equipment both from the grid and from auxiliary systems (battery and generators) if the grid power supply fails. The provision and maintenance of sufficient cooling for your equipment is included. The provider also takes responsibility for all physical security of the facility.

Most large colocation facilities have existing managed high-speed connections to the majority of connectivity providers, with some being points of presence for connectivity to public cloud providers via AWS Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, for example. However, bear in mind that usage charges for connectivity still require an extra contract and payment.

2. Third-party services may well be available at data center speeds. Large providers will have thousands of customers, many of which will be cloud service providers. Many of these will provide SaaS or functional microservices. By being in a facility that will be connected using low-latency, high-speed links to all other facilities under the facility provider’s control, you can subscribe to these services and use them as if they are on your own network. For example, Equinix Marketplace offers services from more than 9,500 other customers.

3. Scalability needs can be negotiated on an as-needed basis. A fully owned facility with just one user is difficult to size to cover needs over a period of time. Will the organization’s needs grow or shrink? If they grow, will changes in equipment density mean that the actual space required shrinks? Colocation offers a means of escaping such problems. You can rent sufficient space for your immediate needs, negotiate new contracts if you need extra space or use clauses agreed to in the contract to lower space requirements at defined times.

4. Colocation can offer much higher levels of platform availability. The facility, power, cooling, connectivity and so on are all managed by a company that exists purely on public figures around how well it manages availability for its customers. If you have a badly configured hardware environment with poorly written software on it, you will still have poor overall availability, but that is a different problem.