5 Ways Colocation Can Help Cut Costs

Eliminate Capital Investments in Your Data Center and Reduce Operating Costs

A November report by Tier1 Research found that the global multi-tenant datacenter market continues to grow.  The credit crunch coupled with small and mid-size businesses reluctance to invest significant capital and operating expenses in private datacenters is also driving the demand for outsourced datacenters and co-location.  Rather than invest the capital to build or expand an in-house data center to meet their IT needs, many companies are sharing datacenter space by co-locating with others in multi-tenant managed datacenters.

Online Tech has seen these same trends in the State of Michigan.  As companies need to cut back on IT capital intensive projects and reduce operating costs in their data centers, co-location in multi-tenant datacenters can provide a solution that requires no capital investment and can often reduce operating expenses by leveraging the datacenter operator’s staff skilled datacenter specialists.

Multi-tenant datacenter operators offering co-location or dedicated server hosting can help cut costs by:

1. Eliminating large-scale datacenter investments.  Co-location enables IT managers to expand their datacenter on a server-by-server or rack-by-rack basis.  This lets IT managers expand their data center footprint only on an as-needed basis.
2. Reducing the day-to-day maintenance chores of the IT staff, co-location and dedicated server hosting enable the in house IT team to concentrate on core applications and deliverables and leave the day-to-day data center operations to the colocation operator.
3. Leveraging the experienced data center staff as needed.  Rather than hire full time data center experts in security, cooling, power and networking – managed data center operators share their expertise over a number of data center users – amortizing the cost of the experts over many clients.
4. Reducing the cooling, security, and power costs – by eliminating datacenter footprint required for future expansion and cutting the costs of building and maintaining security systems, co-location can offer a much more cost effective approach than running a stand-alone datacenter.
5. Receiving rapid and accurate responses from datacenter providers.  It can be hard to keep in house staff motivated to service other departments.  With competing requirements and many demands, responsiveness can be impacted. Outsourced datacenter operators are in the service business.  They keep their customers by being responsive and accurate, and realize that poor service can hinder their business and profitability.