Out of the various competent options present today, selecting a colocation provider requires some legwork. You have to take multiple factors into accounts, such as security, maintenance, staffing, and support. After all, you’re finding someone to trust with your confidential information.
So — To ease your job and smooth out this hectic process, here are the top 5 questions to ask when selecting a colocation provider:
What to Ask When Selecting a Colocation Provider
1. Do you own the data center?
The owners who have control over their hardware, data center, and support can control these resources. They are better, faster, and able to assist you with your specific needs. Hence, look for a colocation provider who owns their data center to get more accessible customer service and support.
2. What network connectivity do you offer?
The network connectivity of a data center determines the data center’s network reliability and the level of network solution your business will get. Opt for a data center that offers bandwidth from multiple tier-1 backbone providers. In addition, make sure the contract terms and their facility design is flexible to a reasonable extent.
3. Do you have a secure data center?
A secure data center possesses the following characteristics:
- The building is located in an accessible area and has a high degree of geographical stability.
- There’s a reliable physical and logical security system in place.
- The data center offers third-party audits to monitor its security standards.
Visit prospective facilities for yourself to make sure that the data center employs all of the security measures.
4. How do you manage disaster recovery?
It is critical for every data center to have redundancy, security, and reliability for disaster recovery. Ensure that they have multiple data center locations to hinder any outages and provide optimal support remotely. Additionally, they should provide you with the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) identification.
5. What resources and tools do you offer to support my business growth?
It’s best to keep check of the tools and resources your data center offers to your customers. For example, Are these resources available for use 24/7/365? Do they provide server reboots? How do they handle trouble tickets? Is everything automated or manually operated by live agents.
Bottom Line
Finding the right colocation provider for your business entails several factors that can’t be overlooked.
In conclusion, the questions mentioned above are fundamental and entail almost every critical aspect you need to check before making the final decision. Therefore, you get benefits such as flexible scalability, better uptime reliability, improved resource allocation, and lower personal and operational costs. Moreover, If you are looking for a reliable colocation provider, COLOCO can be your partner in need.
