The footprint cost of companies of all sizes utilising premium space can be very high, whether it’s their own in-house Data Centre, office space or similar. In this article we explore the 3 types of environments for data and why companies are switching to colocation data centre hosting to reduce the cost of using premium space in-house.

 Three Environment Types

Most of the companies utilising premium cost environments use them for housing physical infrastructure that represents at least these 3 environment types:

●    Production systems

●    Test Environments

●    Development environments

 Let’s explore those 3 environments now to get an idea of what they represent. Also, how switching to a colocation data centre to house them makes sense in terms of cost, scalability and security.

Production Systems

First up, production systems are critical to your company's success because they are used to run live applications and services that customers rely on. As you probably know, any downtime or failure in the production system can have severe consequences for your business. This could be a loss of revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and reputational damage to the company.

Utilising premium space in colocation data centres means that your companies’ production systems are housed in secure, reliable, and redundant facilities.

Premium data centres like IP House, London, offer advanced security features like biometric access control, video surveillance, and 24/7 monitoring. All of which minimise the risk of cyber threats, physical breaches, and other security risks.

IP House also supplies redundant power and cooling systems, multiple internet service providers, and backup generators to ensure uninterrupted operations even if there are power outages or network failures.

Test Environments

In general, test environments are used to validate software changes before they are deployed to production systems. Also, they are vital to ensuring that new features, updates, and bug fixes do not interfere with existing functionality for your company’s services. Furthermore, test environments must be as close (in specification) to the production environment as possible to ensure accurate testing and avoid potential issues down the line.

Premium space in a colocation data centre can provide your company with the flexibility to create customised test environments that meet their bespoke needs. In addition, they can easily scale up or down as needed, and you avoid the expense of building your own in-house test environments. Lastly, premium data centres typically offer high-speed connectivity and access to cloud service providers. This means that it is easy for your company to deploy and test applications across different environments.

Development Environments

The final type are development environments which are used by software developers to build and test new software applications. Overall, these environments require significant processing power and storage and must be flexible enough to support multiple development teams simultaneously.

By using a colocation data centre, your company can create customised development environments that meet your specific requirements and save on in-house premium space. Also, you can easily scale up or down as needed and avoid the cost of building and maintaining your own in-house development environments.

Finally, premium data centres also offer high-speed connectivity and direct access to cloud service providers. This makes it easy for developers to build, test, and deploy applications across different environments.

The Transition To Colocation Data Centres

In the majority of cases the development and test environments do not need to use in-house premium cost space. Therefore, many organisations are now moving these environments to lower cost, colocation data centres such as IP House.

By doing this your company can significantly reduce your costs because you are no longer using premium space within your own buildings. Also, you have the flexibility to expand and scale at any time using a colocation data centre.

Distributed Logical Security

Important security benefits of housing your data in a colocation data centre include distributed logical security and physical security (IP House have 24 hour security and monitoring). As expert Stephen J Bigelow asserts,

“A data center is the technological hub of modern enterprise operations. The data center provides the critical IT infrastructure needed to deliver resources and services to business employees, partners and customers around the world.

Source: Stephen J Bigelow, Tech Target.com, May 2022

Reflections

Clearly, colocation data centres can help your company better manage your production systems, test environments, and development environments. Although some boards of directors may be reluctant to house data offsite due to security concerns and brand reputation, the tide is changing as colocation data centres are now seen as reliable and robust in their security measures.

Using a colocation data centre can provide significant benefits to companies managing their production systems, test environments, and development environments. Furthermore, the reduced costs saved on premium, in-house space is very significant. Transferring your data offsite allows your company to relocate that premium space to other projects.

There are also further environments that help test the waters of Colocation Data Centre’s, such as Sandpit environments and other Multi Test scenarios, IP House has extensive experience in helping businesses of all scales to review and eventually transition in a safe, secure and fully controlled manner.  IP House offer flexible scaling and contracts, to ensure clients can grow and adjust footprints with a cost model that works to their requirements.

By leveraging the advanced infrastructure, security, reliability, and flexibility provided by a colocation data centre, you can reduce downtime, improve testing accuracy, and help develop software applications more efficiently.

Many reading this blog may question how does this compare with Cloud solutions, in short there are viable solutions that again can make the overall cost base more efficient, by utilising Cloud alongside Colocation Hosting - this will be covered in out next Blog 😊 – Stay tuned!

Interested in using a colocation data centre for your company? Fill out the form below today and let's talk!

Sources:

1. Tech Target.com:

https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/How-to-design-and-build-a-data-center#:~:text=A%20data%20center%20is%20the,and%20customers%20around%20the%20world.

 2.Leeway Hertz.com:

https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/How-to-design-and-build-a-data-center#:~:text=A%20data%20center%20is%20the,and%20customers%20around%20the%20world.

 3.Medium.com:

 https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-move-a-data-center-4ab553cd131d