SMBs moving to Colocation and Cloud Computing

Something we’ve seen for a while at Online Tech is the rapidly progressing movement of small and mid-size businesses to outsource their data centers.  Last week, the WSJ highlighted the growing adoption of outsourced data centers by small and mid-size businesses to colocation and cloud computing.

Something we’ve seen for a while at Online Tech is the rapidly progressing movement of small and mid-size businesses to outsource their data centers.  Last week, the WSJ highlighted the growing adoption of outsourced data centers by small and mid-size businesses to colocation and cloud computing.

The WSJ points out that colocation services have been around for years, used mostly by larger enterprises.  Now smaller firms are increasing attracted to outsourcing their data center to trusted hosting providers driven mainly by 2 factors: 1) cost savings and 2) security.

We can attest to the cost savings.  It’s almost impossible for small and mid-size businesses to match the level of security and availability for mission critical applications by building their own data centers and server infrastructure.  The cost for redundant power, cooling and Internet is dramatically lower when shared in a multi-tenant environment.

In addition, the expertise available to small businesses through a hosting provider typically far exceeds what their onsite staff can provide.  Our engineers work on broader set of systems and issues in a single day than most in-house IT staff see in an entire month. This allows us to hire the best and apply that experience across hundreds of clients.

The WSJ article goes on to point out that enterprise level security has become much more cost effective by leveraging the scale of cloud computing.  With private clouds and managed shared clouds that are designed around availability and security, cloud computing delivers true enterprise capabilities for a fraction of the cost to small and mid-size businesses.

The article is a good read for any small or mid-size business looking to get more IT bang-for-the-buck.

Seeking Safety in Clouds