Develop a Co-location Strategy
Successful data center co-location strategies are a function of cost and vendor selection.
- Organizations encounter significant capital expenditures, when building or updating their aging data center facilities, are faced with a difficult build vs. buy decision.
- Many organizations are hesitant to outsource the data center because servers are housed outside the facility and not within their direct reach.
- Co-location services have turned into a commodity where vendor offerings are underpinned by the same basic set of services.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Mid-sized organizations generally achieve a Tier 2 data center environment, at most, due to cost and resources. Co-location facilities generally offer Tier 3 or higher facilities where organizations can realize benefits of higher reliability and availability.
- A vendor’s engagement practices should be thoroughly examined during the selection process. Because basic services offered by co-location vendors are largely commoditized, vendor selection will often be based on price and service.
- The decision to outsource often results in a significant decrease in both OPEX and CAPEX (when building or renovating the data center) for facility costs such as power, cooling, standby power, and fire protection.
Impact and Result
- Justify the build vs. buy decision using business requirements and budget scenarios.
- Maximize success by aligning business requirements and vendor offerings with predetermined criteria to aid in the selection process for a co-location vendor.
- Validate decisions and perform due diligence on short-listed vendors by conducting site visits to vendor facilities.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Talk to an Analyst
Our analyst calls are focused on helping our members use the research we produce, and our experts will guide you to successful project completion.
Book an Analyst Call on This Topic
You can start as early as tomorrow morning. Our analysts will explain the process during your first call.
Get Advice From a Subject Matter Expert
Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your project, interpret and analyze the results of each project step, and set the direction for your next project step.
Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- Federal Air Transport Security Authority
- United Way of Calgary and Area
- Municipal Police Services
- Siltronic Corporation
- SSAB
Consolidate Your Data Centers
M&A Runbook for Infrastructure and Operations
Considerations to Optimize Container Management
Select the Ideal Infrastructure for Your AI Workload
Repatriate Cloud Services