There’s nothing as essential for the growth of a business as its data. Data helps us understand business processes, predict customer behaviour, make better decisions, and so much more.
Technological progress has allowed companies to take their future into their hands and devise smart plans for improvement. When you analyze your business intelligence regularly, it can tell you a lot about your pain points.
However, businesses often don’t have the capacity (or funds) to support their data and computing needs. That’s where data centres can come in handy.
Colocation
As a small or medium-sized business, you probably don’t have enough space or resources to create your own data centre. What’s more, such a facility is difficult to maintain and keep up.
Running your own data centre can cost as much as a staggering $25 million a year. So what are your other options?
If you still want to have your own servers and equipment, but running a whole facility is too much for you, you might want to consider colocation.
Colocation is the practice of co-housing your servers in a third-party data centre. If you choose this option, you’ll be sharing the facility with other companies, but you can still be in full control of your equipment.
You shouldn’t worry about data centre safety either as these facilities come with a high level of physical protection.
Data Center as a Service (DCaaS)
If your servers are overextended, and you are in need of new data infrastructure, then a data centre as a service (DCaaS) could be a solution for you.
A DCaaS provider offers you their space and infrastructure. You get to use their servers and storage as well as their networking power and computing resources. Experienced IT staff are also usually part of the package.
Essentially, by utilizing a DCaaS, you outsource your data centre to your provider. Of course, you can always access your data and the provider’s computing resources remotely.
As you can see, there are two options to choose from — colocation and DCaaS. No matter which one you opt for, you’re bound to see immediate benefits for your business.
How a Data Center Can Help You Scale Your Business
A data centre can solve many of your problems, help you get unstuck, and grow your business like never before. Here are some of the ways it will allow you to expand.
Increased Data Storage
The most obvious benefit of data centres is the fact that you’ll have much more space to store your data. Businesses generate more and more of it each year, and even though a lot of it can be weeded out as noise, there’s so much insight to be gained from it.
As your business grows, so does your need for more storage, and failing to obtain it promptly can cost you a lot. Data centre usage allows you to expand your capacity quickly and efficiently so that it can accommodate your future needs.
Even if you have enough storage as is, you might want to consider using a data centre for backup. You never know when it may come in handy.
Better Security
Speaking of backup, it is extremely important to secure your data, and these centres can help with that too. Almost 95% of companies that experience a huge data loss never recover and consequently close.
So if you don’t want to become part of this bleak statistic, even if you have enough storage on your own premises, it would be wise to use a third-party data centre. It will act as data insurance should a disaster strike your business (such as an office fire, which is much more common than you may think).
These facilities are also well-protected against any physical harm through the use of various measures, such as security personnel, biometric authentication, video monitoring, etc. You can rest assured that your data will be secure from any cyberattacks or physical harm.
Better Computing
As you’re probably aware, piling terabytes of data on servers is great, but you also need to analyze it to gain any meaningful insights. Going through such vast expanses of raw information is not an easy task, and you need significant computing resources for such an endeavour.
Machine learning software and cutting-edge algorithms can help you find patterns and hidden tendencies, but only with enough computing power. You can obtain it as part of your data centre services provider and enjoy all the major analytics tools that used to be reserved for tech giants.
Extra computing resources will allow you to be a lot more productive. You can think of them as your hidden superpowers that allow you to expand your services and scale your business in a blink of an eye.
Less (or No) Downtime
When your access to your most precious asset, i.e., data, is cut, you experience downtime. One research has shown that the average cost of downtime is a mind-bending $5,600 per minute. This number does take into account larger companies as well, but it is still a scary average.
So whenever you experience downtime, you lose money, and if you start experiencing it regularly, it can seriously damage your business and make it regress.
There’s no better way to ward off these unwanted breaks than by utilizing the security and reliability of data centres. Thanks to your provider, you won’t experience any downtime, and you’ll be able to progress much more quickly as a result.
Uninterrupted Connectivity
Data centres provide their users with a variety of connectivity options, which allows them to tailor their infrastructure needs from scratch.
You won’t have to worry about connectivity issues ever again. If some problem does occur, you won’t have to hire professional IT help to solve it — just take it up with your data centre, and they will fix it in no time. However, you’re highly unlikely to experience connectivity issues as data centres’ infrastructure was designed with it in mind.
Uninterrupted connectivity means uninterrupted productivity, which is yet another factor that will allow you to scale your business like never before.
