Choosing a data center or colocation provider to house your company’s critical IT infrastructure is a difficult decision. Migrating your IT environment is risky, expensive, and time consuming, which is why you want to make the right choice the first time. This white paper reviews the top 10 criteria to discuss when touring data centers in order to make the best choice for your company.
Unfortunately, colocation providers don’t make it easy to differentiate between them. Many data center tours will have the same components: a sales rep will show you their data center’s battery rooms, cooling equipment, security measures, and generators, all the while assuring you that they are highly secure, reliable, well maintained, invulnerable to natural disasters, and capable of high density computing.
After a few tours, it may seem as though there isn’t much difference between one data center and the next. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s important to know what to look for so you can make an informed decision. Migrating your IT environment is risky, often expensive, and certainly time consuming — you want to make the right choice the first time.
What is a data center? Data centers exist to provide a place to house a company’s information technology (IT) and network equipment. A data center’s mission is to create reliability, mitigate risk, and provide uptime for the technology and applications that it enables. Before selecting a provider, be sure to discuss these criteria to get a clear picture of the data center’s capabilities in order to make the best choice for your company.