Maturing Your Workload Placement Strategy: How Colocation Can Help

Discover the advantages of colocation in optimizing your workload placement strategy

May 31, 2023

Are you considering moving your business applications to the cloud? You're not alone! The public cloud has experienced explosive growth in recent years as companies seek to take advantage of its flexibility.

As the public cloud has grown, IT teams have discovered the benefits of lifting and shifting existing applications to the cloud, achieving quick wins in the process. But is going all in on the public cloud the right move for your organization?

According to a recent Gartner analysis, for most organizations, running 100% of workloads in the public cloud or on-premises is not the best option. Most organizations benefit from an optimal mix of on-premises, edge, colocation and cloud infrastructure options. By evaluating and placing each of your individual workloads in the environment it’s best suited for, businesses can expect increased governance, cost predictability, improved performance, greater security, and more.

Workload Considerations

The following are just a few considerations for why the public cloud-only solution may not be the right answer:

Cost Optimization:

You need to transfer large amounts of egress from your public cloud applications.
You require predictable IT spend month-to-month.
You have legacy applications that would require refactoring to move to the cloud.

Governance and Security:

You have sensitive data that needs to be stored and processed in compliance with relevant data sovereignty laws and regulations.
You need increased security via single tenancy, which may or may not include the need for complete control over your hardware’s security layer.
You want to use common DevOps tools to provision and manage private cloud hardware.
You require greater control over your data to ensure that when you need to access it, you will never be shut out by a third-party.

Performance:

You need to be at the edge where your customers are and achieve significantly lower latency.
You need to quickly and efficiently scale workloads beyond public cloud platforms.
You want to directly interconnect with a wide range of customers, partners and service providers.

As these digital business initiatives change over time, a workload placement strategy is ongoing. According to Gartner, “By 2027, 85% of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements.” Thus, these considerations should be revisited regularly.

"Organizations rely on an increasingly diverse digital operating environment that has profound effects on cost, agility and stability. I&O leaders should ensure that their workload placement strategies provide clear guidance that maximizes value today and provides the flexibility needed for tomorrow. "

Gartner, Workload Placement in Hybrid IT — Making Great Decisions About What, Where, When and Why

How Colocation Can Help

Arguably the biggest advantage of a colocation data center managed by an infrastructure services provider is that it enables organizations with the flexibility to keep up more easily with the rapid pace of technology. This environment streamlines your workload placement strategy, helping you consistently have in place the skills and the most appropriate infrastructure for dynamic workloads.

Through a centralized infrastructure provider with a full suite of services, you have the flexibility to co-locate your data in state-of-the-art facilities, connect to multiple public clouds, deploy private clouds and bare metal, connect to your on-premises environment, and interconnect with customers, partners, and service providers seamlessly.

Colocation enables greater IT governance compared to the public cloud, with the ability to deliver a cloud-like experience compared to traditional on-premises environments. It can provide the building blocks needed to enable cloud-adjacent architectures, edge computing, and other use cases that can help optimize your workload placement strategy.

Leveraging Evocative for Strategic Workload Placement

With a history of colocation expertise and client success, Evocative leads the way in hybrid workload management. At Evocative, we work closely with our clients to assess each individual workload and recommend the path forward that’s tailor-made to fit your unique business objectives.

Evocative’s full suite of services, which matches colocation with enterprise-class cloud, network, bare metal, data center, and managed services, are available to help you deploy and manage your workloads to maximize performance, governance, security, and cost.

Companies looking to pivot from the uncertainties that come with public cloud-only deployments should consider what makes their workloads unique and if relying solely on the public cloud limits their capabilities. With a hybrid IT strategy that leverages Evocative’s colocation services, businesses can be assured that they’re maximizing the benefits of their deployments.

To learn more about how Evocative can help you create a customized workload placement strategy, we invite you to register for a whiteboard session.

Supercharge Your Workload Placement Strategy with Evocative

Register for a Whiteboard Session Today

To learn more about how Evocative can help you create a customized workload placement strategy, we invite you to register for a whiteboard session.