Choosing a colocation site may be a massive decision, but price should not be the final decision-maker. The location should always be the most important consideration.
Of course, your budget is always going to be crucial in any venture of this size, as is your business’ current needs and your potential need to scale things in the future. However, the location should always drive your decision.
Here’s why.
The Importance of Your Site’s Location
As complex as this process may be, your reasons for doing it are incredibly simple: You need off-site storage in the event that an unforeseen emergency compromises your primary data location.
So, boiled down to basics, your off-site facility needs to be located far enough away from your primary data location that it won’t be affected or compromised by the same events.
This may include:
- Natural disasters
- Power outages
- Connectivity outages
- Cyber attacks
- Equipment failure
- Human error (Still the biggest threat)
Decision-makers need to consider all of the worst-case scenarios in choosing their colocation. This is why a New York-based stockbroking firm should consider a location away from hurricanes and snowstorms, or a Silicon Valley tech firm would want their location far away from earthquake zones.
Your colocation site must always be a safe distance from these disasters. They also, obviously, need to be easily accessible from major roads and highways, while remaining connected to well-maintained and reliable power generators and systems.
If you’re still early in this process, we invite you to click the following link for information on data center services and everything you need to consider.
Far Away Does Not Need to Mean Out of Reach
Speed is always of the essence in times of crisis. You need to implement a disaster recovery (DR) center to minimize downtime and restore information as quickly as possible, while keeping the cost of the outage or incident as low as possible.
Not too long ago, if your colocation facility was on the other side of the country, you may have gained security but sacrificed accessibility. An internal site was thought to be the best option when recovery speed was paramount.
However, today’s technology has made a hybrid approach leveraging both internal external sites the best of both worlds, giving you security, flexibility, and accessibility.
You should strongly consider leveraging the hybrid model of your own on-site data centers, colocation data center providers, and public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) such as Microsoft Azure.
A hybrid cloud infrastructure can transfer data between internal and external data sites via a wide access network, or WAN. This method will give you the ability to access your storage resources via a public recovery cloud, while maintaining and protecting your critical data in a private cloud.
Even if your needs include huge volumes of data or high-volume computation, the hybrid cloud infrastructure allows for complex coverage. You can secure physical resources without having to maintain your own facility, while your data can still be restored from a public or private cloud.
Of course, there are countless other variables to consider when making this decision and you will need to factor in your potential needs in the future, should the need to scale arrive. However, location will always be key, and you should never make your decision solely on price.
