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Colocation Buyers Guide - Europe

What You Should Know Before Making a Colocation Decision
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Table of Contents

1. . . Does This Sound Like You?

2. . . What Is Colocation
3. . . Europe 4. . . What should you look for

5. . . One size doesnt always work for all

6. . . Expected ROI

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Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

Does This Sound Like You?

Looking for a colocation partner in Europe, and a due diligence checklist to assess if the partner meets current as well as future needs. This whitepaper explores the criteria that organisations should evaluate. It is targeted at CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors and any other person looking for information on the topic.

Executive summary
The growth of the digital economy means Information Technology (IT) is now at the heart of business. IT has become a business enabler, fostering the agility and flexibility required for an organisation to drive innovation and expansion. For this reason, the infrastructure that supports IT has become increasingly vital. To achieve the highly secure and resilient colocation environments that are necessary to meet these modern business requirements, many organisations are outsourcing all or part of their technical, web and IT infrastructure to expert third-party data centre providers.

When choosing a colocation partner in Europe, it is important to find a company you can trust that offers a secure and reliable environment for your businesscritical infrastructure. They must be able to provide a network located in primary positions for connectivity and power, as well as expansion plans to meets your on-going business growth requirements. In addition they must have stability to support this type of growth.

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Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

Co-location, where companies hire data centre space from a service provider, is a popular trend, with colocation companies and big data centres being setting up across the globe to provide IT as a fourth utility. The growing question now is why would enterprises invest in their own IT equipment when they can just tap into colocation data centres and get a provisioned service for a much lower cost. Co-location makes managing the data far simpler for companies, as they do not need to spend their IT budget on maintaining the data centre and hiring staff to look after it.

TO LET

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Business benefits of co-location

The business benefit is the cost, both on the capital investment side and the operating expenditure side because enterprises do not have to invest in the equipment themselves; they are paying on a usage basis. On the OPEX side enterprises dont have to have teams permanently employed to manage the data centre.

The best way to think about it is businesses like Amazon, where they get huge amounts of demand at certain times of the year like Christmas and then they need to flex up in a huge way, but they dont want to have this capacity all year round so if you outsource or lease it then obviously you can take more bandwidth at critical times of the year when your customers are going to require more capacity,

Improve Reliability & Availability Improve Efficiency & Performance Reduce and Eliminate Costs Scalable Reduce Risk Meet Compliance Needs

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Modular Datacenter

What is Colocation ?

Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

With 28 Member States and a population of nearly 500 million Europeans (compared to 300 million Americans), the European Union (EU) spans a large part of the European continent. The sheer size of this potential client base therefore offers a unique opportunity for developing new markets. The EU has established a single market across the territory of all its members. 17 member states have also joined a monetary union known as the euro zone, which uses the Euro as a single currency. In 2012 the EU had a combined GDP of 16.073 trillions international dollars, a 20% share of the global gross domestic product (in terms of purchasing power parity). According to Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2012 (September), the EU owns the largest net wealth in the world; it is estimated to equal 30% of the $223 trillion global wealth.

EUROPE KNOWS YOUR CULTURE AND SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE

All over the EU, more and more firms and households are connected to the internet, and more business is being done online which both reduces costs and boosts efficiency. By 2011, 71% of households and most businesses in the EU had access to the web. Additionally 33% of EU businesses were buying and 21% were selling online the market is clearly far from saturated.

It is committed to promoting economic prosperity and creating jobs, by offering an environment that favours competitiveness between companies resulting in better skilled workers and attractive prices to consumers.
In addition to being a growing political entity, the EU is first and foremost a free trade area, meaning that its members have agreed to eliminate tariffs, quotas and preferences on all the goods and services traded between them. As a result, trade between EU member States represents two thirds of all EU trade, with varying levels between countries.

Network independent data centre capacity in the city centres of Europes financial and digital hubs is the most effective choice for enterprises looking for a resilient, highly-connected infrastructure to supports todays bandwidth-heavy digital economy.

Companies should look for colocation partners that can demonstrate expansion plans in the key European hubs, providing the assurance that their growth plans can be accommodated into the future with premium data centre capacity.
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Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

What should you look for in a European colocation provider?

Connectivity
The data centre should act as thriving, connected, digital ecosystem with direct access to international and local fixed line, broadband and mobile networks, internet exchange points, content distribution networks, trading platforms and cloud hubs. These hubs will facilitate the secure storage, sharing, and distribution of mission critical applications, data, content and media.

Connectivity Flexibility

Flexibility
Flexibility from your colocation partner is vital. From choosing your location in the data centre to selecting the power, services and support levels you require, the solution must meet the business evolving needs.

Energy efficiency Security

Energy efficiency
The rising cost of power and the growing focus on corporate carbon emissions from the EU and national governments is putting increasing pressure on organisations to demonstrate energy efficiency. This has caused energy efficiency to become one of the key outsourcing considerations, and it is now a differentiator when organisations are choosing a third party data centre supplier.

Security
In todays global economy, cybercrime is becoming a real threat to commercial security, with many attacks perpetrated by organised criminals who have the resources to pay for high levels of hacking expertise. Indeed, a recent study estimated the global cost of cybercrime for businesses at $114 billion annually.

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Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

According to Info-Tech Research Group, 64% of organizations engage in some form of datacenter colocation services. In addition, Gartner has observed more and more enterprises enlisting colocation services, and the research firm has identified several reasons behind this trend.*

64% of
Organizations Engage in Some Form of Data Center Colocation Services
*Source: Focus Research Group Colocation Services Buyers Guide

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Because organizations are more geographically distributed, they dont necessarily have an optimal central location in which to locate a datacenter and Web systems.

Traditional office buildings dont always meet the cooling, power and weight requirements to house dense and heavy hardware, and retrofitting them is too expensive. Also, these buildings rarely allow for the lockdown security measures that companies want for their server rooms. Colocation gives companies that are consolidating or outgrowing their internal datacenters a cost effective alternative to building new facilities.

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And, finally, remote lights-out management technology makes administering remote systems easier, allowing IT staffers to even reboot servers remotely.

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Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

One Solution Doesnt Always Work For All

Colocation Not A Rocket Science

Choosing a colocation provider is a strategic business decision that evolves from thoughtful consideration. It is important to know what to look for and the right questions to ask.

Five 9s? Three 9s? Whats the Difference?

Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. Many providers will state their availability as percentage such as 99.999 or 99.9. The difference? Two fewer nines means an average of 86 seconds more downtime every day, or 43 minutes more downtime every month.

Outsourcing the responsibilities of your IT Infrastructure with colocation can provide the traditional benefits of lowering costs and re-directing resources; however, like many organizations, you may be asking, Is it a fit for me? To make an informed decision, TALK TO US

64% of organizations engaged in a colocation agreement have a dedicated vendor resource responsible for managing their services. 55% of organizations that established a shopping list of services aligned with their business needs were more likely to experience colocation success.

*Source: Info-Tech

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Colocation Buyers Guide Europe | WHITEPAPER

Expected ROI
More than 200 CEOs, business owners and IT decision makers were surveyed on their expected ROI timeline for a colocation solution. Read on to find out when they believe colocation will pay off for their business.

Colocation due diligence check-list

Consultative, customer-centric approach

Experienced people
Focus on customer service and delivery Premium standards and engineering excellence Capacity for growth & ongoing investment

70%
of CEOs, Business owners and IT decision makers expect to see a return on investment from their colocation solution

Choice of connectivity

29%
Within two years

Pan-European presence in key cities Connectivity and support services Value for money

24%
expected a return within six months

Environmental leadership

40%
Within twelve months

Financial stability

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A New Rating System For Data Centres | WHITEPAPER

Who we are
Fulcolo.net provides small, mid-size and enterprises flexible IT infrastructure solutions with its Modular and Virtual Datacenters. Fulcolo.nets customer approach leads to innovative solutions that offer unprecedented visibility and control, helping customers make better decisions about risk, agility and operational efficiency. Fulcolo.net, a service provided by Fulcrum IT Service Pvt Ltd, facilitates a hybrid cloud approach for IT departments and business units seeking choice, platform compatibility and a cloud partner that focuses customers unique infrastructure needs.

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