You don't need hundreds of servers to use a data centre. From backups and CCTV footage to licence servers and GPU rigs, here are eight things small businesses put in ours.
You don't need to be a large enterprise with hundreds of servers across multiple racks to use a data centre.
At Enlink we'll house anything from a single server, a NAS, or even a mini computer. If you're not sure what colocation involves in the first place, we've covered what it is and what it's like inside the building separately.
This article is less about what it is, and more about what you could actually use it for.
Here are eight compelling reasons.
The most common place to start, and usually the easiest to justify.
Whether it's nightly backups, a shared drive, or both, a data centre provides a secure home for your most important data.
The data lives on your hardware, in a facility with proper power and cooling. Accessed over one of our leased-line connections, it's almost as fast as having it on your LAN at your office, and we can even completely bypass the Internet for total data security.
Furthermore, in an emergency, if you need all the data back at once, you can collect the equipment in-person, rather than waiting on a download. For bulk data, that's the difference between hours and days.
Your email is a record of your business's history, but live mailboxes are not a reliable archive.
By creating a dedicated off-site archive, you get a tamper-resistant copy of all emails, which matters for retention and compliance obligations, where you may need to produce copies of messages from years ago and prove they haven't been altered.
It's also useful for avoiding more mundane problems, such as someone deleting something by accident, or ransomware infecting the live mail server.
In the last few years, European countries are starting to talk a lot more about not only data sovereignty, but software sovereignty too. If a country (or corporation) has control over the software you use, its time to start looking at self-hosting.
Many popular application servers have alternatives you can run yourself, from private office suites and databases, to collaboration tools and internal systems.
Running them on your own hardware, on a server in your own country, gives you back total control. It's an even more compelling option for businesses working with genuinely sensitive information, such as client records, financial data and legal documents.
It's usually cheaper too. Per-user subscriptions scale with your headcount; your own server doesnt.
CCTV recorders often sit inside the building they're watching. If anything happens to the building, be it fire, flood, or just vandalism, the recorders are often damaged along with it. And in the case of theft, the recorder is often the first thing taken because it holds the footage of the person taking it.
But stream your cameras to a recorder in a data centre, and the footage survives whatever happens on-site. It's worth checking your bandwidth before committing, since continuous camera streams can add up.
Plenty of professional software, be it for engineering, accounting, or design, needs an always-on licence server on the network. Colocating it in a data centre makes the license available whenever, and wherever people need it, including from home, and reduces of the risk of something happening to it in the office.
AI workloads, 3D rendering, and video encoding, all use GPU hardware, which can be loud, hot and power hungry. Offices are not built for that, and a serious rig could trip your circuit, as well drive everyone mad with the noise and heat.
A data centre has the power and cooling to run it properly, 24x7. In some cases, this will mean off-loading it from workstations in the office to dedicates hardware, which frees up your team's machine for other work.
Websites, customer portals, e-commerce platforms, or APIs are rarely self-hosted in the office. For many, the cloud is a solution, but it brings it's own problems; shared resources, and performance that can vary depending on other user's workloads, not to mention billing complexity and the unpredictability of costs.
Colcation does away with all that, and gives you a genuinely isolated and secure environment, with high bandwidth options, dedicated resources and predictable performance, which matters when it comes to things that are customer-facing.
The most flexible way to use the cloud is to build your own. Run virtualisation on your own hardware and carve it into as many servers as you need, without paying per instance, whilst still giving predictable performance and costs, alongside dedicated resources.
It suits steady, consistent baseline workloads especially well. Plenty of businesses pair it with a public cloud for genuine brsts, but keep the baseline in a colocated rack.
If you're coming to colocation from the cloud, you get back control and sovereignty of your data, and you prevent US authorities from compelling access under the CLOUD Act, which applies to American providers even when the data sits in the UK. We've written more on that in six reasons businesses are leaving the cloud.
If you're coming to it from a cupboard in the office, what you gain is resilience. Proper power with generators in reserver, proper cooling that doesn't shut down at the weekend, fire suppression that won't kill your equipment, and 24x7 security, all in a building designed for the job.
Either way, the hardware stays yours.
For more information, visit our Colocation Rackspace page or contact us with your questions.
