Colocation resolves these shortcomings. It is a service that allows school districts to place their existing hardware in purpose-built data center facilities, ensuring reliability with redundant power, cooling, and connectivity to guarantee uptime for applications. Comprehensive security protects your IT environment. These data centers also house cloud service providers, meaning extra capacity is just a cross-connect away. Schools can burst into the cloud as needed or migrate as they depreciate hardware in a true hybrid cloud configuration.
What Is Colocation?
Colocation is simply floor space, power, cooling, and sometimes bandwidth in a service provider’s data center. These data centers are redundant with many available carriers, dual fiber paths, and dual power sources, meaning they offer protection against network or power failures. The amount of space rented is entirely up to the client — anywhere from a partial rack to an entire data center. Enterprise class service providers offer various compliances (SSAE 16, PCI, HIPAA, NIST, etc.) and more than 99.9% SLA’s for uptime. Colocation can be combined with other cloud solutions such as cloud computing, managed applications, and managed databases.
Why Consider It?
- Security – protection from disaster, theft, network/power loss
- Reliability – 99.9% uptime or more
- Cost – labor, maintenance
- Performance & scalability
- Office relocation
- Compliance requirements