As a business, you have two options: first, to build your own center or second to outsource to a co-location provider, which include companies like Telkomsigma, Indosat, NTT, DCI and Biznet.
How do you decide which option suits your business better? You can proceed with the following key considerations:
- How do the stored data influence your business’ future needs?
- How much budget do you have for the project?
- What is the current and future size of your business?
- How many existing or future IT staff are expected to manage and maintain the center?
- Are there any laws in your industry regulating data storage and management, and how would this impact your choices and requirements?
In my experience, I have come across many people who often underestimate the cost of building and the complexity of maintaining their own center. The most important criteria for your business is to ensure maximum uptime and to keep servers’ downtime to the minimum possible.
These days, maximum uptime is an undisputable criterion, although a new perspective has further evolved from this called “high availability”. A highly reliable and redundant Tier IV data center will not necessarily ensure the best availability. Main reason is the high complexity of managing such a data center. We want to reach highest availability of data.
For example, this can be experienced on how fast a website or video is loading and running or in today’s times of Industrial 4.0, how fast a robot processor can access crucial data stored in the cloud.
Other factors must be considered as well like the distance to the data center, network speed and reliability. Edge computing is a widely discussed term within this topic but we will not elaborate on this here.