CLOUD VERSUS COLOCATION

As you grow your business in 2014, your need for a better IT infrastructure grows too. As per Gartner’s 2014 industry growth, companies expect a hike of 54% in their IT infrastructure development and management cost by 2015.

Cloud is one of the most popular terms these days when we discuss about IT infrastructure. However, many of us still confuse Cloud Infrastructure with Colocation. Colocation has been around since late 1990’s but is still followed by many companies to manage IT assets. In simple terms, 

• Cloud means moving your entire IT infrastructure (hardware as well as software) to internet and making it accessible from anywhere anytime

• Colocation is having a well built IT room or datacenter, where you have your own hardware and software and you maintain it completely. In some cases, two or more companies may come together to build a colocation center and manage it.

Both of these are valuable options for managing your IT infrastructure. However, before you decide to move to cloud or colocation, here are few points that you need to keep in mind.

• Number of critical business operations, which you are running and are completely dependent on your IT department

• Nature of IT security compliances, which your company adheres

• Cost of managing your IT assets and other overheads

• Data security and encryption needs for your business operations

• Disaster recovery plan in case of any emergency to ensure smooth operations

• Support provided by your Cloud Vendor or Data Center Vendor

Usually small companies are more inclined towards Cloud infrastructure since that requires low setup cost and easy maintenance. However, as your business grows, having your own data center can be a more scalable model as well as cost effective. Moreover, today many cloud vendors are storing managing their own IT assets from colocation centers.

As an ideal case, you should always focus on maintaining a balance between these two options. You can maintain some part of your IT operations from in-house datacenter whereas move your more critical IT operations to the cloud. Both Cloud and Colocation can meet your specific business needs, however, to get started, it is critical to weigh them by considering their own set of pros and cons.