When choosing your path to cloud, it's important to remember why you are making this transition in the first place. For many companies, the cloud is about increasing agility and optimizing your IT assets to your company's best advantage. Every company has unique requirements, so every path to cloud is unique as well.

In "Moving to Cloud is a Journey," Andrew Mametz at Peak 10 describes how colocation can help smooth your transition to cloud. With colocation, you keep ownership of your IT assets. The facilities and personnel required to manage these assets, however, can be maintained by a colocation provider.

Colocation addresses many of the challenges that arise when managing your own data center. By consolidating equipment from multiple companies within a single facility, colocation providers can leverage expertise, capabilities, and volume in ways that are challenging for a single company to achieve. For example, colocation providers can implement multiple layers of security to protect data and applications that can be difficult to achieve in on-premises data centers. Similarly, a colocation facility can maintain a robust power-per-square foot ratio that enables the use of high-density computing solutions for greater operating efficiency.

Colocation providers can also afford to bring on the staff and expertise to maintain 100% network availability, sharing this cost across all of the companies sharing their facility. They can also offer new innovations in technology quickly with low risk to their customers. They are also able to negotiate volume pricing and manage contracts and service level agreements with cloud providers on your behalf.

The cloud brings flexibility to your business. And it brings it in many different ways. You have a great deal of choice with cloud: choice of provider, choice of services, and choice of your path to cloud.

Learn more about how cloud can help you increase your organization's effectiveness, efficiency, and agility.