For many small businesses, they may think corporate IT starts and ends pretty much at their front door. However, IT support experts in New York suggest that even very small businesses today may well have a need for a data center or at least some of the resources provided by a data center.
What is a Data Center?
A data center is a technical facility where clients of the data center keep computer servers, network hardware, and even storage equipment. With some very large enterprises (think Google), a data center may be completely owned and operated by the organization using the data center. Typically, however, a range of organizations share the space and resources in a data center.
Why Do Organizations Need Data Centers?
A data center provides safe, secure, climate-controlled real estate. It also provides stable power and network resources, including extremely fast connections to internet backbones. For most organizations, it would be too expensive to acquire and support these resources themselves, while for other businesses, it is better to outsource the resources to the data center and use it solely for hosting their own hardware.
How Do I Access a Data Center?
A data center will provide physical access so your hardware can be installed and configured. From then on, you will normally access your hardware remotely. Many data centers can also offer onsite support.
Colocation
When you rent the physical space in another company’s data center for your own hardware, this is known as colocation. You may purchase and configure hardware and deliver/install it in the colocation center yourself. Alternatively, you may let an IT support provider in New York to handle this for you. You may even make things a bit simpler and rent the hardware.
Cloud Services
For smaller organizations, the upfront cost and support demands of running a data center or even using colocation to host your own hardware can be burdensome. Fortunately, recent developments have led to the creation of a whole new industry that provides many attractions for not just SMBs but even many large organizations.
Rather than have to deal directly with data centers and hardware, you can outsource the services you need in the cloud. Everything from virtual servers and storage hardware to virtual network infrastructure is available via cloud computing platforms.
The cloud-based services typically provide much greater flexibility to both resource scoping and costs, as well as faster configuration and much more powerful management tools. Though much of this is possible, at least in theory, with your own servers in your own data centers, cloud platforms typically make this possible right out of the box.
You’re Not Stuck with Data Centers or Cloud
The best thing is that you’re not stuck with either of these. Services running on aging hardware in a data center can be migrated to cloud platforms. Products that have proven a success when delivered via the cloud may be migrated to dedicated hardware in a data center.
Whether you’re looking at data centers, cloud computing, or something in between, when it comes to IT support in New York, Simplegrid Technology can help. Contact us today for more information.