What Are the Pros and Cons of Colocation for State and Local Agencies?

Colo can enable agencies to reduce the staff and pare back the resources that presently go toward running an on-premises data center. And colo offers ready access to a level of data-center expertise.

"The location of the data center, access to power, access to network: Those are the main things that these companies do," says Scott Tease, vice president of the infrastructure solutions group at Lenovo. If agencies need to ramp up IT capacity, "there's likely not going to be anyone that's going to be able to do that more quickly than a colocation center."

Colo can help IT teams make the most of thin-stretched budgets. "For state and local, they're looking to save on costs, and they see value in leveraging someone else's data center," says Stacy Woode, senior client specialist for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. With colo, "there's no need to build your own data center, the brick-and-mortar."

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Colocation facilities offer scale, with bandwidth and power available to support on-demand expansion. That can help agencies avoid costly and time-consuming infrastructure overhauls. Still, colocation has its potential downsides.

"You're dependent on someone else's data center, if they have enough power, enough cooling and access," Woode says. "Vendor lock-in may also be a con: If this colo isn't quite working out, the transition cost is significant to get out of that data center and into somewhere else."

And colo may not always be readily available. "State and local governments are likely dealing with smaller colocation facilities that are in-region, in-state. They've got to turn that new capability on, and it's going to take a while," Tease says. "There are lead times to get these things built out."

DCaaS is similar to colocation, but not quite the same. In DCaaS, the servers themselves can be managed by the provider, but are usually owned by the client. With IaaS, the agency has zero ownership of the servers; it just leases the resources.

As state and local agencies explore modernized IT environments, it's important to understand where colocation, DCaaS and IaaS fit into the equation.

With DCaaS, the agency gets "an environment that's fully curated for you to deliver an outcome. Let's say it is some sort of a human resources functionality or finance functionality," Tease says. In DCaaS, "they're running those systems for you."

With this model, "you just need to bring your data and know what outcomes you're looking for, and those companies deliver the outcome that you want," he says. "It's the most turnkey model, but it also has the highest cost."

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In DCaaS, "the services include continuity and access, the networking, the bandwidth, all of the things that need to be working properly in order to protect the infrastructure," Woods says.

This model also offers "a sovereign look and feel," he says. "Especially when it comes to things like AI, you want access to data in close proximity, you want data sovereignty, and you want it to be secure based on any policy or procedure that you may have," and DCaaS can deliver all that.

Then there's also IaaS. "I may not want to touch the servers themselves, but I know what applications I'm going to run. I know what software I need to run. I'm going to run that myself. My IT staff's going to launch things to it, but someone else is going to host that for me," Tease explains.

Unlike DCaaS, "you're not getting the services on top of that. What you're getting is access to hardware that's ready to run," he says.