Importance of Colocation

Colocation is all about location. You are still using your IT infrastructure your servers, storage applications, etc. but they are now being housed in another location. That’s not the case in a cloud or managed services environment: with those services, both the location and the technology infrastructure are the responsibility of the provider. In reality, though, there are many synergies. All three cloud, managed services, and colocation providers invest heavily in their data centers. Unisecure offers colocation services at data centers in the US. Some of the same data centers we use for our cloud and managed services. We provide the physical space while leaving control of the applications and hardware to our colocation clients.

Colocation is sometimes confused with “hybrid cloud.” They are different solutions, addressing different needs, but they often work well together. With a hybrid cloud solution, a client uses a mixed architecture that includes both cloud services and a traditional, hosted infrastructure. This provides the best of the legacy, physical world—performance, stability, reliability—coupled with all that the cloud has to offer, including rapid deployment, scalability and consumption-based billing. Hybrid and colocation work together because the legacy infrastructure can be housed at the client’s location or at a colocation provider. An enterprise that wants to take advantage of the cloud and maintain its legacy infrastructure and a house that infrastructure somewhere other than its own premises is a prime candidate for a hybrid/colocation combination. The fact that so many enterprises fall into this category is a key reason why Unisecure offers both cloud and colocation services.

The ability to deliver reliable round-the clock, high-bandwidth connectivity is one of the major factors driving the growth of colocation. Colocation customers should look for a provider with data centers that offer access to a variety of network providers and support both inter-data-center connectivity and high-speed routing. Enterprise-class colocation providers will also hold their own range of IP address space in addition to an autonomous system number (ASN). To help enable dynamic routing, be on the lookout for facilities that run the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) with full Internet table routes. With Unisecure colocation customers get guaranteed uptime and high performance standards for both local and international traffic.