The debate is heating up. With cloud what is the life expectancy of CoLo? Some argue it’s on life support and others say there are many very sound reasons why it has a long and healthy life still ahead. Here are a few top reasons why CoLo is alive and well.

1) What if your business is running specialized software and its associated hardware that needs a specialized and highly trained staff for support?

Yes of course cloud is here. But we are seeing the predominant market for cloud today being the SMB. There are great advantages for the SMB to consume cloud but they are probably not utilizing sophisticated and specialized software and hardware to run their business. For the larger enterprise that relies on these specialized apps and associated hardware, having the ability to utilize the required specialized technology to run your business in a scalable, virtualized, secure and managed facility CoLo is and will be their best choice.

2) What if your business already has a large CAPEX investment in your current technology?

Budgets are tight and always will be. No CFO in their right mind will support swapping out technology without a valid ROI. Example: The average life expectancy of a server is between 3-5 years. What if you are in the middle of that life expectancy (or at the beginning) you will have a very hard time justifying why you would want to make those go away and write off that significant investment. And also consider the fact that there are many companies that very much prefer CAPEX for financial accounting reasons – and you don’t want to try and argue with that.

3) What if your company has yet to dive into the deep end of the cloud pool and is implementing a hybrid cloud model?

This is probably the most compelling reason why CoLO is alive and well. When the cloud hype all started we all read that everything was going to the cloud and hybrid cloud was rarely mentioned. Hybrid cloud is now all the rage and Gartner now states that 50% of all enterprises will use hybrid cloud by 2017. So if you are implementing a hybrid cloud strategy what do you do? One could easily argue that the CoLO model was created specifically with hybrid cloud in mind. The ability for the CoLo to provide a secure, scalable, virtualized, managed and on-demand resource for your hybrid cloud environment fits like a glove.

Does your business have specialized technology where going full cloud simply isn’t an option yet? Does your business have a large investment in your current technology where utilizing a CoLO facility may make sense? Are you like 50% of all enterprise businesses implementing a hybrid cloud model?