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How to Choose the Right Data Centre for Your Business
Many businesses today, especially SEMs, are beginning to appreciate the power of outsourcing. SMEs can now access data centre services without having to invest large sums in establishing their own through gathering it themselves. If you think that your business could benefit from paying for access to a data centre, here’s what you need to consider when making your choice.
Know Your Purpose and Goals
As with any other technology in business, your data centre should be supporting your overall goals and objectives. If your data centre is not actively helping you work towards these, then you need to have a very good reason for making the investment. If you don't have a clear picture of what your long-term goals are, you are going to find it much more difficult if not impossible to determine which is the best data centre for your business.
Make sure that your reasons for investing in a data centre are clearly defined, as are the goals and objectives that investment is going to help you towards. It is important that you consult with all of the relevant employees in your business when you are making these decisions.
Decisions about things like data centres concern anyone within your business who is going to be relying upon those data centres to carry out their function. If they have any concerns, you can address or alleviate these. Make sure that everyone is on the same page and understands what you are doing and why.
Some larger businesses might be considering opening their own data centre and investing in the necessary infrastructure themselves. However, most smaller businesses will be looking to access an outsourced data centre. A colocation data centre gives you access to their records for a set fee. You can visit virtusdatacentres.com for more information. Virtus provides flexible solutions and can offer you the best option for your individual requirements. You can always scale your chosen package up and down as you need it; this is one of the main benefits of the colocation approach.
Check Their Availability and Reliability
A data centre that you cannot rely upon to remain online and available throughout the working day is not going to be able to support your business. In fact, many businesses will also need their data centres to be up and running when they are shut down, as data centres perform a number of functions. For some businesses, their data centres will be handling only a relatively modest number of requests on an hourly or daily basis. On the other hand, there are some businesses that will need to exchange a high volume of requests with a data centre on a near-constant or constant basis.
In either case, you need your data centre to be available whenever you or your customers need it. A good data centre provider will have contingencies in place that will ensure a dropped connection is replaced or replicated seamlessly for the user. Exactly how this is achieved is not so important for businesses - it usually involves a combination of live backups and automatic connection rerouting. But the end result is the same from the perspective of the user, whenever there is a problem with one connection or one particular server, the service will automatically reroute the user to an alternative.
Security
If you are going to entrust the data centre to handle sensitive data regarding your business or your customers, you need to make sure that you can trust its security. The long-term effects of major security breaches can be significant for both businesses and their customers. It is easy to forget that every time a major data leak happens, especially ones where millions of individuals are concerned, there is often scope for identity theft and other forms of fraud to be perpetrated. This is why businesses like Sony have previously offered free identity protection following data breaches within their businesses.
This isn't a situation that any business will want to find themselves in, and it is easily avoided by doing your due diligence beforehand. Modern data centres should have a robust security infrastructure and should be able to fend off attacks in real-time. This is on top of a basic level of security that ensures access to data is restricted and that that data is kept encrypted as far as is practical for its intended purposes.
Consider the Location
The location of your data centre matters for a number of reasons, but there are two in particular that you need to pay attention to. The first is the proximity of your data centre to your business. The other is the local climate where your data centre is located.
The distance between your data centre and your business will affect the speed that you are able to send and receive data at. Even with a fibre optic cable, you only get about 25 miles before you begin to lose an appreciable amount of speed. If you are operating in or near a major city, you should be able to find a data centre nearby.
Make sure that you carefully vet any data centre provider before you commit to them and entrust them with your most sensitive data. It is always a good idea to check out user reviews and ensure that everything is above board and that you are entrusting your data to a reputable provider.