Many businesses, including small and mid-sized businesses, are starting to see that collocating their equipment and data within a data colocation center is a good idea. Smaller businesses that are unable to afford traditional IT services will find that they can have many of the same features and benefits of an IT team when they start to use colocation centers. It helps to increase their capacity without the need to have servers in their actual physical location, which is also a huge benefit. The following are some of the reasons that businesses of all sizes are looking into this type of service.
Count on the Connections
One of the best reasons for your small business to start using a colocation center is the quality of the connections. They have redundant connections, meaning that they are always up and running, even if something were to happen to one of the connections. The visitors to your site, your customers and clients, will always be able to access your site and information. They will be able to shop, contact you, and use your site 24/7. If you had a server on site, and it went down, they would not be able to get onto your site until you had someone fix the server.
Great Security
Security is important for any company, especially those businesses that have any sort of sensitive information. Private information on clients or customers, including financial information, needs to be entirely secure. Colocation centers are a safe alternative to onsite servers. Quality data centers will have several different types of security. They will have security from unauthorized physical access, as well as systems in place to stop would be hackers in their tracks. They can also provide environmental security, ensuring the proper temperature and having systems in place to deal with the possibility of fire and flood.
Keep More Physical Space
One of the big issues with having servers that are onsite means having a room specifically for those servers. This takes up valuable real estate in your business that you could use for other purposes. By using a colocation center to house the equipment and data, you will be able to have more free physical space on your property.
Flexibility
A colocation data center can also offer flexibility that you can’t find with traditional servers. While you may have a small business now, when you are working with one of these centers, you can scale your business up as needed. When your company and requirements grow, you can scale up the usage of the center to meet those needs without the need to buy expensive physical servers to keep on your property.
Bursting
The best centers will also let you “burst” your bandwidth capabilities in order to handle a larger amount of traffic that you might get on certain days without having to invest in a larger service right away. The system can distribute these increases in data usage across users, which helps to keep the overall costs down and at reasonable levels.
What Types of Business Benefit?
Many types of small business will get a substantial amount of benefits from using colocation data centers. Those who have online stores or financial services, or any type of information that needs to be available to customers around the clock will enjoy the quality and the ease of using these centers.