Traditional colocation environments are paving way to “cloudy colo” capabilities that deliver hybridization with cloud services as well as cloud-like visibility and control, according to a recent survey conducted by Internap (News - Alert) Network Services, a provider of IT infrastructure and IP transit services.
The survey, which polled more than 100 IT decision makers in the U.S. from a wide range of industries, including technology, media and entertainment, healthcare, financial services and retail, revealed a growing demand for “cloudy colo" features that bring many of the benefits of the cloud – such as automation, self-service, detailed real-time insights and remote manageability – compared to more traditional colocation environments.
"Colocation, with its capex model, security, control and customization advantages, continues to be a critical infrastructure choice for many organizations,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap, in a statement.
While cloud services are another important option, an all-cloud strategy isn't appropriate for every situation, Dutt added. As a result, there's growing interest not only in hybrid infrastructure solutions but in redefining the limitations of traditional colocation services by integrating the benefits of the cloud.
"'Cloudy colo' capabilities will bring these two worlds together, delivering new levels of business agility to colocation users and, just as importantly, to cloud users by making colocation readily accessible and integrated into their environment," Dutt said.
Some of the top cloud-like colocation services that gather momentum include bandwidth monitoring (88 percent), power utilizations (85 percent), equipment reboot (77 percent), server health monitoring (76 percent), hybridization with cloud and other IT infrastructure services (72 percent) and inventory management (67 percent).
According to the survey, 57 percent of respondents are interested in a hybrid IT Infrastructure environment that includes a mix of colocation, cloud and hosting services to meet a range of application and use case requirements.
Internap's multitenant data center survey also revealed that nearly 65 percent of respondents are considering public cloud services, with the majority of those (41 percent) doing so based on perceived reduced costs, followed by improved scalability (23 percent).
The top priorities when choosing a data center provider include availability and performance. Fifty percent of respondents ranked network availability/performance and uptime assurances/SLAs as the No. 1 priority when selecting a multitenant data center provider. Security was also ranked "important" or "very important" by the largest number (98 percent) of respondents.
Another major trend revealed by the survey is enterprises’ clean plans for high-density power usage in the future. For example, while just 15 percent of respondents are currently using more than 8kW per rack, nearly double that amount (27 percent) expect to consume 8kW or more per rack within the next five years.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey