The Opportunities And Threats Faced By Colocation Service Providers

Colocation providers are having a great time with the hosting environment rapidly becoming a harvesting zone for them. Of course, with increasing opportunities, there are greater challenges too as customers are becoming more demanding and there is greater pressure on delivering with greater efficiency. The top providers are busy finding ways to turn the situation to their advantage by assessing new types of architectures and experimenting with new tools so that better quality services can be delivered in a cost-effective manner.

In the past, colocation providers had to deal mostly with facilities professionals and procurement businesses. Today, their clients include IT managers, business executives, digital officers and other key decision makers of growing business establishments. The entrepreneurs are finding it necessary to improve their knowledge and skills so they communicate logically with their new clients and show that they mean business.

The Transition Phase And Challenges

Not surprisingly, colocation companies are also in a transition phase. With new opportunities available to them in different business segments, they now have to reinvent themselves and create a whole new approach to business management. Many companies have used the merger and acquisition route to improve their quality of service, technologies and geographical reach.

Colocation service providers are also aware of the tremendous business opportunities that are now available to them, thanks to newer developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. These developments have opened up a need for edge computing which leads to requirements such as data acquisition, storage resources, compute and others.

How To Convert Threat Into Opportunities

Some debate is happening on whether cloud computing is indeed a business opportunity for colocation providers or acts as a subtle threat to their business. The elastic nature of the cloud makes its handling easy and it can also adapt to variations effortlessly. Colocation providers can convert the cloud threat into a business opportunity by adding cloud services to their list of offerings or by partnering with a cloud provider.

Many top colocation providers already have the capabilities and the infrastructure to serve the needs of top internet organizations. They can expand their services to newer markets where data centers are not yet available. They can also explore business opportunities by reselling the cloud services of internet majors to their own customers.

Other possible ways of improving their business output and profitability can include:

• Using cloud providers as tenants
• Partnering with companies offering private and public cloud services
• Adding cloud hosting services, and software as a service to their offerings

To scale greater heights of success, colocation companies must first understand the problems of their customers and device ways of resolving them quickly and with greater efficiency.

New And Path-Breaking DCIM

Greater business opportunities await colocation services that dare to be different. Many service providers are investing in data center infrastructure management software or DCIM which makes data center management easy. Colocation companies can use DCIM to deliver additional, value-added services to their clients.

DCIM is a path-breaking technology and being increasingly used for improved data center management as it brings in better consistency and control to operations. With DCIM, you can easily convert data into logical figures and provide managers a more correct and accurate performance insight across all your IT and facilities. This can put you in full control of functions across the whole data center system and thus drive up efficiency and reliability. As an offshoot, it can also bring down operational costs significantly.

Ways Of Handling Current And Future Problems

The need for a flexible and resilient data center design has never been felt more than now as users grapple with the challenges of keeping pace with the changing technologies and trends. Flexibility is fast-becoming a critical need for data centers. By using the latest available technologies, colocation companies can address all the needs and applications of customers in a cost-effective and efficient manner. They can also use the improved level of service and technology to attract new customers and easily retain the existing ones.

Data center management experts recommend that colocation service providers consider the issue of data center density seriously and remain prepared for the challenges, not only at the time of commissioning but at every stage. For this, they can consider using modular data center architecture that is designed to improve performance and tackle challenges efficiently.

With the size of data centers increasing and size of operations reaching higher densities, the issue of safety of data takes center stage as a critical area of concern. Colocation services can deal with this by training staff members regularly and using advanced tools to ensure that proper procedures are followed. Regular audits must also be conducted to verify that data center procedures are in line with regulations and demands of the industry.

In conclusion, it can be stated that in the current ever-changing business landscape, colocation providers face the challenge of building data centers that are highly resilient and can be operated in a cost-effective manner. They can easily overcome the problems by leveraging the benefits of IoT and Big Data and of course the cloud.

Interesting Topic: Advantages and Disadvantages of Colocation Hosting Servers

What Is Colocation Data Center?