When it’s time to expand your data center, you may be considering options like migrating to a public cloud solution or utilizing colocation services. Recently, some colocation providers have begun expanding their offerings to include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which may cloud your decision even further.
While a colocation center offers data center space, they don’t offer servers, provisioning, or managed services. But when a colocation also includes IaaS offerings, they are also providing the servers and managed services. So, you may be asking how colocation with IaaS is different than public cloud. It is different, in five important ways:
Control: In general, colocation with IaaS is going to offer a higher level of control to businesses using it than they would experience with public cloud. Rather than a virtual server, the company is gaining access to a physical server that can be provisioned according to its specifications.
Bare Metal Server Configurations: Speaking of physical servers, this is one of the primary differences when it comes to colocation IaaS versus using the public cloud. The public cloud gives your company access to virtualized infrastructure, while colocation will involve bare metal server configuration.
Management Support: One critical advantage that colocation with IaaS offers is the option to access additional services for areas like provisioning and infrastructure management. When migrating to a public cloud solution, you are generally left to navigate infrastructure management on your own.
Cost: The cost of colocation with IaaS is higher than public cloud options, but you may decide that having management support and more control over your servers is worth the higher invoice. Colocation also has minimum usage requirements, so you can’t simply turn off a server when you won’t be using it.
Public cloud virtual machines tend to cost a fraction of what colocation services cost. A business using colocation should expect to spend at least several hundreds of dollars each month, at minimum, to access their services.
Security and Monitoring: Another drawback of colocation is that there isn’t a suite of security and monitoring tools available that you will find with a public cloud infrastructure option.
A colocation center with IaaS can be a great alternative to public cloud, depending on your need for higher levels of control and management support. If these benefits don’t justify the higher cost for your organization, or you have a need for advanced monitoring or security tools, you may decide that public cloud is the better fit.
To learn more about the specific benefits your organization could expect from expanding your data center capabilities through colocation or public cloud data centers, contact us at eXemplify.