Managed vs Unmanaged Colocation: Which is Right for your Business?

What is Colocation?

Colocation, in simple terms, is a hosting service which companies opt for power servers and hosting.

Various data centers offer these services to businesses, enterprises and start-ups. The benefits of power, space and ability to maintain and supervise server around the clock. Colocation data centers are of a great help to companies that want a competitive advantage without financial investments required to host within the company. Further, it also benefits in deployment time, uptime and the complete server.

Managed vs Unmanaged Colocation

There are various factors by which companies are benefitted by colocation services, starting from a great infrastructure, raised floors, cooling to surveillance. The money invested is only of the rack they rented. IT network of a company gets escalated by choosing the colocation services from a top rate data center.

Colocation has two sub-categories: Managed colocation and Unmanaged colocation. The choice from two of them can impact process, cost, and responsibility and involvement of datacenter.

The four levels at which Managed colocation differs from Unmanaged colocation can impact cost of operating a server is:

• Monitoring and Tracking
• Responding and Repairing
• Housing and Protecting
• Preventative Measures

Managed Colocation

The services of monitoring and tracking, repairing and problems and taking measures to protect data can be outsourced using Managed colocation services. This relieves the companies from the burden of managing disasters on their own. Unmanaged colocation services are the base of Managed colocation services. In managed colocation data centers, the enterprise can outsource these services at a lower cost.

These services can include:

• Capacity Planning
• Multi-probe Monitoring, Alerts, and Logging
• Technical Support
• On-site Backup and/or Off-site Backup
• First Responder, Troubleshooting, and Remediation
• Part Replacement and Service
• Patch Management
• Asset Tracking
• Threat Management

These services can impact the business big time if executed properly; companies can enjoy lesser chance of downtime or data loss. Managed colocation gives enterprises the comfort to choose from a variety of services they would like to outsource without releasing total control.  

The managed colocation data center provides the power to companies to work without hindrances as their servers will be backed up and secure at all times, along with choosing solutions according to their needs.

Unmanaged Colocation

Unmanaged colocation gives companies the authority of data centre’s infrastructure while maintaining responsibility for server issues. The best advantages of Unmanaged colocation are security and space and the other advantages which affect the choice between the two are:

• data communications connections
• environmental controls
• power supplies
• security devices

Tier rating is an important factor which defines the ability of the data center to safeguard itself from disasters, the higher tier rating, the safer the data center. A Tier IV data center is capable of staying less affected by downtime and power failures and provides a higher redundancy on power and network.

The two choices can affect your business on a high level as you will be able to choose whether to take your machine and install it on their rack or rent the server machine from the datacenter itself. Price shouldn't be the main factor affecting the choice as colocation is a long-term investment. The choice between managed and unmanaged colocation can affect the security and success of your business.