Data center outsourcing (DCO)

Data center outsourcing (DCO) is an arrangement wherein businesses outsource all or portions of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing servers to a specialist third-part service provider called host. The DCO may be annual or multi-year contract in which the host provides professional and product support services ensuring that the clients data center runs efficiently and uninterruptedly. By outsourcing a datacenter, organizations free up their resources and reduce expenses. It also allows them to access resources that are not available internally, such as – equipment, expertise, processes, space, power and cooling.

Typically, data center outsourcing services may include colocation, application performance monitoring, system management, managed hosting, managed storage, and database management.

There are different levels of DCO services. Some mange customer-owned or leased infrastructure on the customer’s premises, including on-site technical support. These DCO usually provide services to modernize the customer’s legacy infrastructure with virtualization options. They may also provide the customer physical rack servers, blade servers or virtual servers or a hybrid configuration that offer access to public cloud server resources when needed. These services collectively termed as colocation.

Advantages of data center outsourcing include:

- Reduced equipment and operational expenses

- Access to more server

- More efficient use of infrastructure

- Ability to adopt innovative technologies

- Flexibility to expand storage or computing capacity

- More security and disaster recovery