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¿What is Colocation?

What is colocation

¿What is Colocation?

Colocation is when organizations place their own servers and other essential computing hardware for data storage in rented space in a physical data center owned or managed by a third party.

Improve connectivity, security, and reduce costs with data center Colocation (also known as “colo”) gives your business access to a more robust infrastructure than a typical on-premises solution and will typically deliver near 100% uptime through SLA.

Because data center colocation tenants share operational costs for areas such as power, cooling, bandwidth, communications, and security with other tenants, you can avoid having to plan for capital expenditures such as UPS, multiple backup generators, power grids, and HVAC units.

Ongoing maintenance costs associated with maintaining and managing one or more in-house servers are also taken out of the equation.

All of this makes colocation cheaper and easier than building and managing a dedicated data center for a single user.

Protection and control with Colocation Services

Colocation services to help you protect mission-critical data with the highest levels of security and operational reliability. For example, Miami data centers boast an industry-leading uptime history of >99.9999%.

Features:

» Multi-layered power, cooling, and network redundancy

including advanced UPS (uninterruptible power supply) power protection, to keep business-critical processes running around the clock.

» A “remote hands” service

of certified, on-site professional technicians is there to get everything back up and running quickly should help be needed. Take advantage of around-the-clock support.

» Intelligent monitoring Ensures that colocation tenants have visibility and control of their physical assets 24 hours a day, just as they would in their own data center. They also give you on-demand access to environmental and operational information relevant to your space.

» Easy scalability

as tenants can respond more quickly to changing capacity needs, whether they increase or decrease.

Digital leaders around the world leverage our trusted platform to interconnect the foundational fabric to drive their success. We have the technology and power to enable you to access all the right places, partners and possibilities you need to accelerate advantage.

How secure is colocation?

Colocation in a data center offers security at both the physical and network level that typically also goes beyond what a data owner can cost-effectively achieve “on-premise.”

Colocation tenants are also protected from cyber threats through a variety of network solutions offered by data center operators, often in cooperation with third parties.

24/7/365 monitoring by on-site guards, including closed-circuit video monitoring.

Secure, controlled access through segregated areas – see how cages and cabinets allow you to custom configure equipment for the highest levels of security. Advanced flood and fire protection protocols to protect the hardware of colocation tenants from any physical threats.

Antivirus and antispam solutions, firewalls, anti-DDoS solutions, VPN connections, and more.

Colocation vs. Cloud

IT hardware is housed within a data center for both co-location and cloud services. However, a co-location tenant retains ultimate ownership and control over its servers and knows where they are located.

On the other hand, a cloud provider is responsible for all the hardware that is actually rented to them, and the data storage customer does not necessarily know the specific location of the data center outside the country in many cases.

What does co-location offer beyond space, infrastructure, security, and support? An additional, rapidly evolving benefit of co-location is access to enhanced services and ecosystems. This means that businesses can quickly and easily switch or exchange service contracts, taking advantage of carrier neutrality, cloud-enabled services, access to multiple cloud services over secure networks, cross-connections with partners in the same facilities, or interconnection of infrastructures with other sites or services.

A good co-location provider will also offer tenants a simple way to meet compliance requirements, an area that is becoming more complex year by year as governments focus more on consumer protection..

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