If you operate a small or mid-size business and rely on your in-house network and stored data to deliver services to your customers, you know how expensive it can be to maintain security and manage operating efficiencies.

For many businesses and organizations, the question becomes how best to grow the business, manage the budget, and secure the data without the financial burden of added capital expenditures and expanded IT costs. It can be quite a juggling act.

If you are faced with this question, shifting from in-house IT operations to an off-site co-location facility may hold the answer for your business. Here are four of the top advantages of data center co-location.

Lower Costs

Data center co-location is an effective way to reduce your overhead costs, improve productivity, and position your company to take advantage of growth opportunities as the arise. Instead of investing in expensive equipment and software upgrades as it grows, your company can instead take advantage of a data center’s higher bandwidth, greater power supply, and faster connectivity – all of which are more scalable and cost effective than what you could get by going it alone.

Better Security

The information you store on your network requires a high level of security to protect against malware, data theft, and ransomware. A data breach can expose you, your team, and your customers to identity theft, negatively impact your reputation, and diminish confidence among both current customers and potential customers. Data centers maintain round-the-clock systems monitoring to guard against cyber attacks. They have tools in place to deal with security problems quickly and efficiently.

Disaster Mitigation

A fire, flood, or other natural disaster can strike when you least expect it and cause enormous damage in a very short period. If your servers are housed at your location, you run the risk of losing all your data and perhaps your business itself. Even if you have backups, it can take days or weeks to get everything back online and operating at full capacity. The impact to your bottom line could be devastating. Data centers are constructed to provide greater protection against natural disasters and they maintain redundant systems to help ensure against downtime.

Advanced Technology

To operate at peak efficiencies, data centers invest in quality equipment, up-to-date software, and technically skilled personnel who are on duty 24/7 to monitor systems, handle emergencies, and maintain security. When you work with a co-location facility you gain these high-value resources without incurring extra cost.

The Bottom Line

Data centers and co-location facilities offer businesses large and small tremendous benefits at affordable costs. Besides saving you money, improving productivity and securing your data assets against threats, data centers can help you expand your operations, provide extra capacity when rapidly emerging business opportunities arise, and remove a lot of the guesswork from your budget planning process.