Getting The Most From Your Small Business IT Budget

Your small business relies on computing resources to get your product and services out to the marketplace. Maintaining your own technical infrastructure and keeping technical staff trained can take a large part of your budget. One way to get the most from your IT dollars and have access to state-of-the-art technology is through colocation. By sharing the resources with other businesses, you'll reduce the burden on your own business to maintain your computing environment while giving you what you need to be successful. Here is how colocation helps your small business.

The Colocation Model

Providers of colocation services (like Cologix) maintain and operate large data centers containing current database, server and networking technology. You will share the hardware and software resources with other businesses without the responsibility of maintaining your own facility. You can focus on what your business does best and leave the environmental issues, security and power management to the facility operators.

Shifting Your IT Costs to the Colocation Provider

With this model, you become the user of the resources and shift the responsibility of maintaining them to the provider. This saves you money in a number of areas such as:

  • You don't need to maintain a physical environment for your computing hardware.
  • You need fewer technical staff, if any, on board to support the systems.
  • You'll have the additional resources you'll need when expanding without purchasing more than you really need.

You Have Choices Depending On Your Computing Needs

Your business can lease equipment from the colocation provider that you will share with others. If your needs are met by standard off-the-shelf equipment, this lets you have access to the most current technology without maintaining the servers yourself. You'll also shift the equipment costs from your capital to your expense budget.

If your business relies on special equipment, such as for data collection, monitoring and measurements, you can have the facility host your own equipment. They will take care of the power and environmental requirements, and the security of the equipment.

Access to Scalable Growth

As your company grows, the effort to do capacity planning to make sure you have the computing resources to support your growth becomes a critical and time consuming task. One advantage of the colocation model is that you have access to additional resources as you need them, and not all at once. As you grow, more resources become available to you to support your business at the current level so you need not buy all of the resources you need right away for growth you expect to happen a year from now. If plans change, you're not stuck with unused capacity you've already purchased.


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