For every company, choosing a data center location is a very important factor that can affect the safety of data. Along with other factors and services like technical support and connectivity options, the physical location is very critical, especially if your business is majorly online.
The performance requirements are among some of the top things to consider since you need a location with an optimized web environment that can reach your entire audience. An unstable connection that is on and off shows is inefficient and unreliable.
It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for an Atlanta colocation facility or require the services of a software-defined data center (SDDC), you need to look into the location and not just go for the nearest colocation facility. Determine if a hosting provider offering the services of a data center in a specific physical location will meet your business needs.
Here’s more to understanding data center location and why location is an important factor to consider.
Understanding Data Center Location
Proximity/ accessibility
There are two types of proximity to consider: the data center’s proximity to your business and your website’s visitors. When it comes to the proximity to your audience, you can opt for a data center located near your business, especially if you might want to visit your data center every once in a while to see what’s happening.
This is also a great option in case you urgently need to solve an issue and cannot get in touch with your host’s customer service team. In cases where you have a reliable data center with a supportive and accessible customer service team, you don’t have to visit your server unless it’s a colocation service.
The second is the proximity to your website’s visitors, in terms of where they frequently access your site. You can check location stats via analytics software.
For example, you’ll find the stats by going to the audience, select geo and finally the location if your site is linked with a Google Analytics account. On location, click a country to see where most of your users are located.
However this information is for a limited time, so always increase the time frame. You can then go ahead and select locations and significant cities depending on the analytics though just selecting a data center within the same country it’s located should do the trick.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a group of servers geographically distributed that work together to bypass location limitations for fast delivery of Internet content thereby allowing a quick transfer of assets for loading Internet content. It generally entails large content and media like javascript files, stylesheets, HTML pages, images, and videos.
Most of a site’s data transfers (close to 90%) are made up of this type of content though there are considerable speedups when a client uses CDN together with an overseas-hosted website.
Content can thus be made accessible to local users faster.
Security measures
Data privacy and security is a very critical factor, especially with the rise of cybercrimes. If not taken seriously any loss or breach can cost a business millions. This is because the data centers and mostly large ones tend to be the target. Your preferred data center must have appropriate security measures in place both digitally as well as physically to ensure that all the stored data is safe.
Risk Management
Harsh weather conditions and climate disaster events can result in great losses, especially when it comes to data. Since natural disasters are impossible to predict they can disrupt a lot of processes due to long-term outages but also lead to great losses. This is mostly seen for data centers that are located close to high-risk areas so you need to balance between risk and proximity.
Natural disasters like flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, among others, can take down networks and cause serious damage that a company might not be able to recover from. The data centers location shouldn’t be in the path of potential natural disasters. By checking risk probabilities, proximity and population density before choosing a data center location, you will be able to tread the balance perfectly.
Edge Computing Processes
The right data center location is very important for a company that is delivering streaming content services or investment in internet of things (IoT) devices. Where the data center facility is located determines the delivery of quality services that are not affected by lag and poor connection strength.
Edge computing architectures that push key processing functions closer to end-users are key to your company’s success. A good data center should be positioned in a location where it can serve your target markets effectively. This is in a strategic, emerging growth market where service providers can reach new users and streamline services seamlessly.
Backup Plan
Every data center should have a backup plan in place since most companies depend on data to deliver products and services. Downtime or damaged data from destruction due to an outage can result in low productivity and deliverance of services. With a well-considered data center location strategy, a company’s valuable data can be protected.
The best way is to avoid storing all your company’s data in a single location, which makes the data vulnerable to potential disasters.
Risks can be posed by human error, ransomware, natural disasters, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. With a carefully considered data center backup strategy in place, a company’s data will always be available whenever needed and the data can be protected from risk at all times. This prevents inconsistent data availability which often leads to harmful long-term effects on a company.
Conclusion
It’s evident that a data center’s physical location is very critical in a company’s decision process. Come up with a data center location strategy and recognize the capabilities of the data center, while assessing the main benefits the physical location can provide. This will ensure that the physical location addresses critical business needs.
