Choosing a Data Center to support business growth requires careful consideration, one of which is to understand its service, including its benefits and drawbacks. Talking about data center services, the term that we often encounter is colocation data center.

Want to know the meaning of “colocation data center” complete with its advantages and disadvantages? Please refer to the article below.

Definition of Colocation Data Center

Colocation Data Center is a data center service that allows customers to store their computer servers in the data center of the service provider where they share the facility with other tenants and customers.

We already understand that a data center is an IT Infrastructure with supporting facilities used to store server computers refer to article: Data Center vs. Cloud Differences. This environment or facility has been optimized to ensure the server computer can run with utmost reliability, efficiency and security.

Instead of building your own data center with the uncertain risk of reliability and security, you can choose to place your IT workload in a data center owned by a third party that has been proven to be effective and with a good track record of servicing other customers.

Simply put, the physical server or hardware that you want to use is yours, and you will deploy the servers and other supporting device in a third-party owned data center.

Advantages of Colocation Data Centers

By using the colocation data center service, what will we get? Let’s look at the following advantages:

1. Guaranteed Security

Data is one of the most valuable assets. Colocation services enable customers to get maximum security for the data in their server. Service providers will provide 24/7 security to ensure that there is minimal risk of safety breach, virus attacks, or other disrupting threats.

2. Redundant Infrastructure

There are many things that must be considered when building a data center, from the building structure to the supporting infrastructure used. Colocation can ensure that you get maximum benefits for maintaining your IT workloads. It will guarantee that the environment for your servers will be maintained in optimum condition, without any concern such as electricity, cooling, or other things.

3. Cost Efficient

A colocation data center has a lot of supporting infrastructure that not only maximize performance but can also make operational costs more economical in comparison to building your own data center. 

By serving multiple customers, a colocation data center has the economies of scale to invest in highly reliable IT infrastructure. On the other hand, building your own data center will require significant costs, time and experience to only serve your own IT workload which may not be financially feasible.

4. Network Ecosystem

To service various customers, colocation data centers will usually build a good connectivity ecosystem with the presence of various network providers or Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”). Customers can get quality networks at competitive quality and price for their interconnectivity needs, thanks to the data center’s network ecosystem. 

5. Scalability

In line with the growth of digital business lines, the requirement for data that must be stored and servers will undoubtedly grow. Colocation data center providers will provide the capacity in terms of space and power to support your business growth with ease and efficiency for your IT workload to scale easily according to your needs.

Disadvantages of Colocation

If we don’t evaluate the advantages against the disadvantages, the comparison may appear biased. What are the disadvantages of colocation data centers?

• Logistics: To access stored data, we can use an internet connection, but if you want to configure your hardware, you need to come directly to the data center location which may be located far from their office.

• Access Control: As part of providing security for their services, data center companies usually have strict rules in terms of authorized access. Companies need to plan to ensure that their authorized personnel can have access to the colocation data center in a timely manner.