Written by: Mohamed Jivraj

Hardly a day goes by where there isn’t some news of a data center being built somewhere around the globe.  Whether it be in the far east, Europe, Australia, the Americas or Africa, the appetite for the hyperscaler clouds to expand is voracious. And with revenue pouring in, in the millions, there’s no reason for AWS, Azure, Google, and Alibaba, not to continue their infrastructure scale out en masse!

Tasked with managing both TeraGo’s cloud and colocation products and services, explaining why colocation is still considered for infrastructure deployment, merits some discussion.

Let’s start with security and compliance. In highly regulated verticals such as financial, health, pharmaceutical, manufacturing (and so forth), both criteria are simply table stakes. Data sovereignty and data residency are key concerns for business and so there’s comfort and safety in managing proprietary hardware where the customer is in full control.

On-Premises may not always be optimal, especially today.

Next, there’s a strong desire to move on-premise hardware to a nearby data center.  Reasons include downscaling office real estate, 24/7 monitoring, and power redundancy. With Covid-19 proving the remote work paradigm, renting out office space at significant cost no longer makes sense; where facilities management is a large cost, leveraging data centres are a better option.  Further, colocating hardware in a secure Tier 3 premise ensures that systems will not be victim to power loss.

The cloud may not be your best bet.

One other consideration, and perhaps most importantly, are applications that simply cannot run on clouds.  This could be attributable to legacy software that has no upgrade path, refactoring efforts that would be a ghastly endeavor, or large data sets (e.g. CAD files) that require frequent accesses; moving data to and from the cloud can present latency bottlenecks that debilitate user workflow, and significant expense as most clouds ding you with egress charges.

Where once deployment exclusively to the public cloud was all the rage, most companies have now settled on a hybrid cloud approach that meshes both private and public paradigms, and where private deployments can constitute collocated servers.  As 5G and IoT technology continues rolling out, more and more use cases are predicated on private environments being housed within data centers that are either close to the “edge” or have ultra low latency. So while each customer scenario may differ, colocation and data centers have very much become entrenched into every conversation.

Mohamed Jivraj

Director, Cloud & Data Centre Services at TeraGo

With over 12 years experience in product development in the cloud, Mohamed has carried out numerous product launches on both hardware and software fronts, His focus has been on delivering solutions that help solve real world problems. He has worked with Fortune 1000 companies to solve technology challenges involving virtualization and multimedia, as they look to transition their infrastructure to the cloud. Mohamed is passionate about technology and providing the best quality solutions for his customers.