The Future of Data Centre Co-location – IPExpo, ExCel London, Wednesday 7th October

For years co-location was the Cinderella of data centre services, somewhere low cost to place servers you didn’t have space for in your data centre. The growth of the internet followed by cloud and mobile that drove a need for high speed, globally interconnected connectivity and the increasing complexity and density of server and storage configurations has changed all that. That doesn’t even take into consideration what the Internet of Things and Big Data will mean for data centre provision in the near future.

Enterprises are now faced with decisions about how and how much to migrate to the cloud, how to deliver a consistent user experience globally across multiple channels and how to manage their legacy applications. On top of that many enterprise data centres need to be refreshed or even replaced. It is little wonder therefore that demand for data centre co-location space has been rising strongly over the past few years and shows no sign of slowing.

Even if you are planning to use hosted or managed services, or completely outsource your data centre, it is more than likely that there will be a co-location contract with the ultimate data centre owner somewhere in that decision chain, and the questions you need to ask are more important than ever.

Location, network connectivity, access to sustainable sources of energy, flexibility, resilience, physical and cyber security all need to be considered. Increasingly enterprises are seeing data centres as revenue generators not just costs centres, so working out what industry eco-systems you can connect to directly within data centres.

One size probably doesn’t fit all when considering where to place your IT assets. Actually co-location as a term probably doesn’t do justice to the richness and cost effectiveness of connectivity, availability, low latency, security and business continuity options provided by today’s data centre co-location providers.

Come and join me at IPExpo  in London on Wednesday 7^th October as I chair a panel to hear what leaders from 4 key data centre providers, Aegis Data, Centurylink, Colt Technology Services and EdgeConnex have to say and answer  the questions you need to ask about using co-location services. Maybe one of those questions should be “what is a better descriptor for the services provided by these data centre owners”!

First published as a LinkedIn Pulse article on 21st September

This post first appeared on the old Cassini Reviews website.