Colocation has helped many companies over the past few years to set up dynamic, scalable, high-speed, low latency and a competitive IT environment. Investing capital expenditure into data centers in today's economic fragility is not viable. CIOs are burdened to deal with uncomfortable truth like Return on Investments and to increase the total cost of ownership before the IT investments can be done. These tight budget approval system has forced IT leaders to look for some alternate and better technology strategies that help in gaining from less investment.

In 2010, world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals which provide customers with competitive advantage, Thomson Reuters, launched Elektron. It is a real-time network hosting environment, which meets strong demand for fast and costs effective access to emerging cash equities market in India. It allows asset managers, hedge funds, brokerage houses, exchanges, banks and other participants to be able to connect to world's largest financial community and to reach global trading partners over the network securely.

Challenges Lying Ahead

There are many challenges faced by enterprises. Some of them are mentioned below:

• Stability of the IT setup
• Scalability and reliability
• Ultra-high speed and low latency network
• Heterogeneous Environment
• A skilled workforce that can manage 24x7 monitoring and management.

Most of the challenges can be coped up by firstly short listing the colocation hosting services that provide scalable, dynamic, low latency, high speed and competitive IT environment. The Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters, Paresh Hegde also faced similar challenges and turned towards colocation.

Benefits of Colocation:

Colocation hostingcompanies have helped many enterprises. Colocation services take almost most of the companies IT infrastructure operations, which helps them to focus on growing their business globally. Here are some benefits listed below:

• Secure, robust, scalable and highly available IT infrastructure for company’s customers with negligible downtime.
• When IT infrastructure is being managed by a third party infrastructure partner, the company can reliably be assured of hassle free and smooth IT infrastructure operations. And they can now focus on growing their business in the country as well as globally.
• ‘Pay as you use’ model has a fixable cost structure and it helps companies to easily derive significant cost benefits.
• Third party data hosting centre also helps with substantial savings in time and cost. No need of investing a huge amount of capital expenditure.

Conclusion

Most of the CIOs are looking for solutions to address their over-utilized data centres or to say it positively while looking at growth projects or data centre expansion, they should evaluate their options carefully.

There are many solutions to address these challenges, but the trick lies in choosing the right path which can fit and helps with organization's short and long-term goals. And doing so, along with keeping parameters like reliability, performance, cost optimization and reduction, and at the top of priority list – ease of management. Colocation is the answer as it offers several more advantages which can help businesses to grow significantly.