September 19
Managed service providers (MSPs) offer their customers the ability to expand their IT capabilities rapidly and leverage the power of innovative technology solutions that keep their business on the cutting edge. By partnering with a colocation provider, MSPs gain access to secure, reliable infrastructure that can serve as the backbone for a broad range of services.
Why Colocation Data Centers are Ideal for MSPs
Organizations are increasingly turning to MSPs to design, execute, and support their digital transformation efforts. This is especially true of firms that lack the expertise and resources to undertake the difficult work of migrating assets, building new applications and dashboards to manage their data, and maintaining expansive networks that integrate multiple mission critical systems. While MSPs have long worked within the confines of the clients’ infrastructure, the shift away from legacy data solutions has forced them to take a more proactive role in provisioning and supporting new environments.
Partnering with a colocation provider allows MSPs to deliver a variety of services to their clients that would not be possible without access to a dedicated data center or cloud service. Given the steep cost of building a private data solution and the lack of control that comes with relying exclusively on cloud providers, colocation offers MSPs an ideal alternative that allows them to focus on their core advantages and deliver better value to clients.
5 Advantages Colocation Data Centers Provide MSPs
1. Reliable Infrastructure
For most businesses, even a few moments of downtime can prove devastating in terms of lost revenue, reduced productivity, and missed opportunities. It can also compromise trust among customers, who are likely to remember those critical moments where they couldn’t access critical data or services when they needed them most. As MSPs help organizations migrate out of legacy on-premises solutions and provide valuable ongoing support with their own proprietary applications, they can deliver greater reliability by hosting assets and applications within a colocation data center with high uptime reliability. While public cloud platforms generally offer 99.99% uptime SLAs, this equates to nearly an hour of downtime each year, which can be crippling for organizations that rely on their mission critical applications. Colocation providers frequently offer 99.99999% or greater uptime SLAs as well as disaster recovery redundancies to keep data available when it’s needed most.
2. Security and Compliance
Many MSPs work with clients that face strict compliance requirements for their data and applications. Whether it’s healthcare organizations that need to comply with HIPAA/HITECH standards or financial services providers that must meet PCI DSS requirements for credit card payments, an MSP’s services will be more attractive to clients if they’re operating from a secure and compliant infrastructure. Colocation data centers also feature outstanding physical and logical security measures that ensure only authorized users will have access to assets. For clients looking to migrate equipment out of their legacy data solution, working with an MSP that has a relationship with a colo provider allows them to build their new IT stack atop a secure, compliant infrastructure.
3. Workload Flexibility
Performance is everything for organizations when it comes to applications and network services. Even a few milliseconds of latency, processing delays, or throttled bandwidth can cause organizations to miss out on opportunities, undermine productivity, and leave customers feeling unhappy about their experience. While hybrid cloud deployments and hybrid IT networks can provide a great deal of versatility, much of that flexibility is wasted if workloads can’t shift seamlessly from one environment to another. In other cases, physical location is just as important. If applications are located too far from their user base, latency can severely impact their performance.
By working with a connectivity-rich and geo-diverse colocation provider, MSPs can ensure that their customers are always getting the best performance possible out of their deployments. They can place customer assets strategically in different data center locations to maximize the power of edge computing. In other cases, they can dynamically shift spending between colocated and cloud resources to ensure that workloads are always fully optimized for performance.
4. Scalability
Both MSPs and their customers should always be thinking about how they can scale capacity quickly without incurring significant costs or leaving themselves exposed should they expand too quickly. For MSPs, growing capacity allows them to take on new customers and expand their service offerings. Their clients, meanwhile, often entrust MSPs to handle the technical side of growth while they focus on gaining customers and delivering new products and services. Colocation data centers make it easy to scale IT capabilities without incurring the huge capital costs of managing a private data solution. Whether the MSP is purchasing or leasing servers from the data center or spinning up new virtual resources through connections to cloud providers, colocation providers offer multiple ways for them to quickly expand capacity without crushing their budgets.
5. Business Opportunity
Partnering with a colocation data center that doesn’t offer its own managed services presents a tremendous opportunity for a growing MSP. Many current and potential data center customers are looking to outsource some aspect of their IT operations to an MSP so they can focus resources on other business priorities. When an MSP has a good reputation and working relationship with its data center, it stands to gain several referrals to assist with migrations, digital transformation projects, and ongoing IT support. Since the colocation provider doesn’t offer competing services, it’s a more beneficial arrangement than working with major cloud platforms, which are constantly seeking to pry business away from independent MSPs.
Discover How Evoque Can Enhance Your MSP Offerings
Evoque Data Center Solutions operates multiple state-of-the-art data center facilities across North America and has established itself as one of the most innovative colocation providers on the market. In addition to offering highly secure and reliable infrastructure for today’s most advanced application workloads, Evoque also offers extensive connectivity options and engineering support to help MSPs build and deploy the ideal solutions for their customers.
To learn more about how your MSP can benefit from partnering with Evoque, talk to one of our colocation experts today.
