Colocation: The Airbnb of Cloud Computing

The sharing economy is the trend of the decade that will dominate for years to come. Whether using Uber or Lyft to move about town or Airbnb to have that beautiful house while in a vacation destination, the sharing economy has done wonders for consumers and those who are renting out their cars, homes, or rooms.

The same sharing concept is becoming vital in business as well. In the world of significant cybersecurity risks, every single company needs security for their essential data about personnel, vendors, suppliers, customers and the like.

Security as a Business Essential

Doubtless, with the prevalence of hacks and data breaches – some of which made significant news headlines (such as Target, Yahoo! and Experian) – data security has become an essential part of every business. The value of this data can reach billions of dollars, not to mention the priceless value of privacy, which makes every company vulnerable.  Very few companies can afford the capital investment needed to protect these invaluable assets adequately.

There are stories of major Big Data firms such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook spending tens of millions of dollars on data centers staffed with security professionals to store data safely. Knowing this, it can be easy to conclude that data security is essential but prohibitive in costs for small businesses.

Colocation Levels the Playing Field

The investment in data security often involves building in-house data centers, which are expensive to install and maintain. With multi-cloud infrastructure being a rising trend, more and more businesses hope to implement these secure, modern tech structures.  Multi-cloud infrastructures can be prohibitively expensive to run in-house.

The sharing economy presents an opportunity for businesses hoping to implement these types of infrastructure to be more secure and scalable on smaller IT budgets. As companies continue to expand and have increased demand for secure storage, security and maintenance of enterprise data can remain affordable using sharing economy innovations.

The promising innovation that is opening doors for companies is called colocation, which allows businesses running multi-cloud infrastructures to rent storage and security space on existing servers and data centers.  This approach is significantly less expensive than building and maintaining proprietary, physical data centers and server facilities for a private cloud setup.

As companies look to harness cloud innovations without adding extra IT costs, colocation is gaining momentum — and IT leaders agree. One of the challenges facing IT managers within smaller companies is matching the latest technology and security with cost efficiency. With colocation services, IT managers and chief technology officers can bring their company to the cutting edge without negatively affecting the company’s bottom line.