Florida colocation: your home office should not be the central hub of your network
Is colocation the same as having your own high performance private circuits for your business?
Anyone can order a private circuit, let’s say from five branch offices, back to your home office. If you order five private circuits, back from your remote offices to your home office, that makes your home office the most critical node in that network, being a hub and spoke network. Your home office becomes the hub.
What is the liability with hosting your data at the home office?
If your home office has an issue, all of your remote offices are incapable of operating. If you centralize your home office activities into a data center such as the Gainesville Data Center when you pick a facility for Florida colocation, then you make the main office less important, in other words equally as important as any of the remote offices. If the home office is off the grid for whatever reason—a natural disaster, an emergency of any sort, a long term power outage—your remote offices do not need to cease functioning waiting for that to be recovered.
What is the solution that would prevent the downtime for my business network?
As a company matures, and they realize that their main office is not well suited to be the hub of data services to the spokes of their remote offices, they must consider Florida colocation for a Florida based business.
If you’re considering a Florida colocation, you must therefore consider the company that operates the data center, and bring back those WAN elements, those spokes, back to what is your new central hub which would be the Gainesville Data Center. In that way you’ve de-emphasized your main office and emphasized your data as what’s being important, rather than the actual physical location of your home office.
So in other words, your home office should not be your central data hub?
As you mature. Obviously, as a smaller company, for cost reasons that’s what’s necessary. Because a smaller company is willing to take that risk. As they grow from one office to two offices, the natural home office, the first office, becomes the data hub. At some point that always becomes a problem, in that most people’s offices were not built to be data centers. They function great when it’s one or two servers and there’s maybe fifty employees. When you exceed that threshold where you have multiple remote offices all depending on potentially a singular connection to the main office, you have a great liability. When your main office goes down, you lose all of your offices, all of your operations.
As my business grows into multiple remote offices, what is the best strategy for accessing my data?
What you need to do is decentralize in that regard, and then re-centralize on a capable data center. But the thing to remember about a data center is to not simply think of it as “pushing my data to the cloud.” Pushing your data to the cloud doesn’t help you maximize your throughput and your access to your data services. But by specifically choosing your network elements, like a hub and spoke where the hub is the Gainesville Data Center, and the spokes are your offices to include your main office, you’re maximizing your performance and maximizing your security back to your data center services.