3 reasons to consider hybrid colocation for your business

If you’re on the fence about the cloud, you’re probably looking at colocation. If you have compliance concerns, legacy applications, or your environment just isn’t ready, hybrid colocation can be an effective stepping stone into the cloud.

It allows you to deploy workloads in the cloud while also renting space in a physical third-party data center for your on-premises data.

But how do you know if it’s the right path for you?

Here are three ways hybrid colocation offers a bridge to the cloud.

1. Increased flexibility

There’s a lot that goes into maintaining your own data center. There’s building the infrastructure, buying the hardware, managing the hardware and maintenance contracts, overseeing the upkeep of the data center, and more. It’s why many CFOs want to get out of the data center business.

Renting space in a third-party data center offers you flexibility. With colocation, you turn your capital expenses into operating expenses, handing things like heating, cooling, building maintenance, and security to a third party for a lower monthly fee. This allows you to focus on your core business, while also giving you the ability to scale as needed.

2. Still in control of your data

While renting space in a third-party data center does move your servers off-premises, those servers still belong to you. As a result, you maintain complete control and have continued access to your data.

You’re just no longer responsible for the total costs of maintaining the data center. This alleviates the stress and financial burden of overseeing an on-premises data center.

In terms of compliance, however, understand that while a public cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS) is HIPAA compliant, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily HIPAA compliant because you use AWS.

You’re still responsible for managing your data and ensuring compliance from the time it originates in your network and moves to the public cloud. This is where enlisting the help of a third-party partner might be in your best interest, working with you to remain compliant based on your needs, regardless of your industry.

3. Seamless connection with the cloud

At its core, the cloud is a collection of computers and servers that exist throughout the world. If you’re going to run certain applications in public clouds like AWS or Azure, you need to select the type of service you require – like storage or computing – within that cloud, and you need to make sure your applications are running in a data center that’s conducive to your business.

For example, if your business is situated in the Midwest, it makes sense to store your data in a cloud server in that area. Equally important, however, is to make certain that, should you need to store applications and workloads on-premises, you have access to a facility that coincides with the location of your cloud data center.

With hybrid colocation, you guarantee that you’re using a data center that offers an on-ramp to where you need to meet your cloud services.

Making life easier in a hybrid world

The IT landscape is a crowded space. When it comes to data placement, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

Despite the vast push to the cloud, organizations must continue to account for their workloads in the physical data space. Hybrid colocation can certainly help with that.

If you want to learn about hybrid colocation and see if it’s the right approach for your organization, contact your SHI account executive.

Jeff Newton contributed to this post.