Migrating your IT to an off premise colo provider - making it a success

Your organisation's IT infrastructure is critical to success, but it can be challenging and expensive to keep everything on premise. Having an on premise DC means you need to worry about power, cooling, security, space, and so much more. That said, moving your data centre off premise isn’t always easy. Like moving home, there are plenty of potential pitfalls throughout the process and the upheaval can be nerve wracking. But, when done right, migrating IT infrastructure and workloads to a facility that will support, secure and connect your IT infrastructure, allows organisations to deliver against their business or IT strategies.

Once the decision has been made to move IT off premise, and the perfect data centre has been found, the process involves significant planning. The implications for IT strategy need to be considered, as well as the practicalities of the actual migration and the steps that will be taken to ensure the continuation of business-as-usual throughout.

Existing users of colocation frequently consider service and support to be key differentiators between colo offerings. What’s most important is knowing their provider won’t leave them in the dark and that their infrastructure and data won’t be vulnerable. Their priorities are often reflected in the questions they ask:

• Can your data centre be trusted to perform? Stories of major outages are the stuff of nightmares for most IT managers. Not all data centres are the same, and some offer higher levels of redundancy and resilience. Our 100% uptime SLA offers assurance against the risks of downtime.
• Will my move off premise significantly improve the security of my equipment and systems? Multi-layered security is vital to protect business-critical IT and workloads, and this isn’t something that most on-prem facilities can provide.
• Is the monitoring, management and maintenance of your facility thorough, and is someone always on hand to resolve any issues, should they arise? The 2020-21 lockdown was a clear demonstration of the potential vulnerability of on prem DCs when facilities aren’t accessible. Our facility is available 24 x 7 x 365, and our remote hands services can be called upon at any time, day or night.
• How environmentally efficient is your data centre facility really? In short, as environmentally efficient as we can be! Environmental concerns are a hot topic, particularly with the recent dramatic rises in power costs. Yes, data centres are major consumers of power, but we take our responsibility for reducing our environmental impact very seriously. We are able to access better power contracts due to our scale and, importantly, our Farnborough data centre uses renewable power, full carbon offsetting and environmentally efficient cooling systems to minimise power usage and reduce costs for our clients.  
• Will I be tied to certain connectivity carriers? Many on-premise data centres are constrained in their choice of carrier, which can cause bandwidth issues and incur high costs. Our facility is carrier-neutral, so our clients can choose the best provider for their needs. Farnborough is a growing data centre cluster, and this has encouraged multiple providers to build out their networks in our region.