Who's The Boss? Business Owner's Guide To Mastering Administrative Basics

If you're seeking to minimize the cost and real estate of your data servers, checking into a carrier hotel is the go-to option for enterprises today. A data center colocation gives you a server rack, or virtual rack on the cloud, bandwidth, and other great amenities. Your entire business, though, could be interrupted if you do not have advanced disaster recovery solutions support. 

Managed and unmanaged colocations provide different disaster recovery solutions. By seeking the following disaster recovery requirements, you can ensure business continuity and data security. 

Managed Data Center Colocation 

A supplier of a managed colocation will provide you with the servers, storage, and network. In addition, you can sit back while they take care of administration, monitoring, and backup and repairs. Although you can be located anywhere, bandwidth speeds will be higher and latency lower if your office is physically close to the servers. 

If your system goes down, your foremost concern will be the proficiency and speed of disaster recovery solutions. Rest assured, colocation services have full power backup contingencies in place. And most should guarantee near-100 percent SLA uninterrupted uptime. To avoid unnecessary and expensive downtime, you will want to know:

• service response time
• if security patches are routinely applied
• what functions are being tracked and monitored
• who pays for parts and labor
• how quickly systems are restored on average

Unmanaged Data Center Colocation 

A rack or cloud provider also provides the option of an unmanaged colocation. They will provide you with storage space, RAM, and data security. On the cloud, you will be charged only for the resources you use. Scalability is easy for both managed and unmanaged systems. You will pay more for system resources and support, though, for growth with a managed system. 

Unmanaged systems are cheaper because you take care of monitoring and tracking, backup and repairs, and disaster recovery. In the case of disaster recovery, you need the peace of mind of having the best infrastructure and security on hand, including:

• a rack space location nearby in a disaster-free zone
• state-of-the-art security features (data centers are rated on a scale of I to IV, based on the number of failures and downtime)
• on-site back-up power solutions
• 24-hour surveillance

In the event that data is lost or a server goes down, rethinking risk management practices for a colocation model can prevent data losses and business interruptions. Risk mitigation best practices include hybrid data storage onsite and on the cloud and clustering software and other resources across many servers. For more information, speak with the staff at a nearby data center.