Many organisations have seen the benefits of public cloud, especially the agility it gives businesses to launch new services many times in a very cost effective manner. However, the journey to the cloud tends to be easier for younger companies, that at times have had the advantage of running purely off the public cloud and never having invested in datacenter infrastructure.
For companies that have already made these investments, the decisions to be made are a little more nuanced. There may be cases where an organisation has made an investment in a datacenter, equipment and various applications, so it may not be immediately cost effective to move to the cloud. Other times single tenanted applications make it difficult to simply move some applications to the cloud directly.
This is where colocation can be useful. A colocation facility is a datacenter in which a business can rent space for servers, storage, networking gear and any other appropriate computing service. This allows the organisation to retire the cost of running the own facility, while ensuring that the hardware they had already invested in continues generating utility for the company in the meantime.
Cloud isn’t always cheaper
The reason we suggest this as a path is because the public cloud is not necessarily cheaper. At times, it makes more sense to simply relocate your hardware to ensure that you get some of the benefits of the cloud (not running your own datacenter) while maintaining hardware that you already invested in. Additionally, for applications that don’t have varied compute usage (hence they don’t need elasticity), you can cover most of the cost of the workload upfront. For this reason, moving to a colocated environment allows companies to free up much needed real estate and talent while giving the organisation the infrastructure stability available in a public cloud.
Another scenario where this may work out to being a better path is if an organisation is in a regulated environment. Colocation with the right software platform can give you some of the benefits of the public cloud, while allowing you to operate within the constraints of the regulation.
For consulting firms, this offers an opportunity to provide hybrid computing services, helping companies manage their colocated workloads and their public cloud workloads.
For datacenter providers, there’s an opportunity to offer this service. For customers in Kenya, the primary providers who have Tier-3 facilities would be:
Datacenters are the primary meeting point for enterprises, cloud providers and network service providers, it’s makes a lot of sense to consider them for the next step of your cloud journey.
