What is Colocation?
Colocation is the practice of housing customer-owned servers and networking equipment in a third party (colocation) data centre.
A colocation data centre is a physical building whereby the data centre operator provides the proper power, cooling and security. Customers know exactly where their servers and networking equipment are located (in contrast with, for instance, public cloud). Colocation data centres are typically multi-tenant.
Colocation data centres are an alternative for in-house data centres or for storing (all) data in the public cloud. Increasingly, hybrid cloud – the combination of colocation and public (multi) cloud – is for most companies the optimal IT architecture.
Benefits of Data Centre Colocation
Data centre colocation provides a high availability environment from which customers can deliver their core business while offloading the technical, organisational and financial complexity that running a data centre entails.
Colocation provides companies dedicated, private connection options to various network, cloud and IT service providers. Tenants can also interconnect to one another.
