Data centers—off-site locations where you can store your business’ data—are an excellent opportunity to decentralize your data infrastructure and improve accessibility, redundancy, and security. But how do you choose a data center for your business’ needs, anyway?
Today, we’ll explore some of the more critical elements you should consider for your data center needs.
Why Consider a Data Center?
You’ve heard of the cloud. At the end of the day, the cloud is just someone else’s computer. If that computer isn’t being managed properly, it could cause interruptions in your business or even put your business at risk.
Hosting your data off-site in a data center, provided that the data center is operating up to par, tends to cover the management and maintenance of the hardware. You can host software and applications from the cloud, and if your business needs custom-developed software, typically hosting it at a data center is a good way to ensure your staff can access it when the software is in production.
Physical Location
Surprisingly, the physical location of your data center can make a big difference, especially in the realm of connectivity.
You might not visit your server location every day, but a physical location reasonably close for occasional access isn’t a bad idea. More important, however, is the location’s exposure to potential natural disasters and geographical risks, like earthquakes and floods, that can damage the hardware if unaccounted for. If you can opt for a data center near major network hubs, you’ll find that connectivity should generally be faster and more efficient.
Additionally, you’ll want to ensure that your chosen data center is climate-controlled with the appropriate cabinets, ventilation, air conditioning, and so on, to protect the hardware.
Security and Redundancy
Hosting data in a data center, i.e., away from the safety of your network infrastructure, can be nerve-wracking, which is why security should be a serious factor for your decision.
The security measures we typically recommend are helpful here: firewalls, intrusion detection, security audits, and 24/7 monitoring. Your data center should utilize the latest security and digital access control,as well as physical surveillance and access controls. You don’t need someone sneaking on-premises to do who knows what to your data.
If you can guarantee that your data is protected physically and digitally, you’ll be able to rest a lot easier.
Scalability and Support
Your business is growing, and you should expect that your chosen data center can adapt as needed.
A data center is an investment in the future of your business, so you need a solution that can scale according to your business’ needs. You might need to add more storage or bandwidth to accommodate future needs. Being future-minded in this way can keep your business committed to one provider without the need to migrate to a new one at some point down the road.
In general, we recommend you pay attention to the service level agreement to know what you’re paying for (and, more importantly, what you’re missing out on), especially in the service realm.
Lantek can not only help you find an appropriate data center, but we can also function as your dedicated IT resource. To learn more about how to leverage our services to your advantage, call us today at (610) 683-6883.