Top five reasons why colocation is the best option for healthcare IT

For healthcare professionals, data is critical. Patients' data is collected in a variety of formats, from prescriptions to medical records, and it must be accurately tracked for compliance purposes. Healthcare organizations, more than any other industry, must protect their information technology infrastructure. Many industries depend on on-prem data centers but increased demands for data storage is facilitating the need for colocation service.

The growth of public cloud has boosted the demand for colocation data center providers all around the world. This demand is separated into two categories: hyperscale customers who are making use of the cheap energy prices, network connections, and tax benefits available; and small business customers who are taking advantage of the low energy prices, network connections, and tax benefits available. The second kind of client is made up of corporate customers that are looking to replace or complement their present internal company data centers, and are attracted to the prospect of purchasing data center services on an "as needed" basis, similar to public cloud usage.

For healthcare businesses that rely on their IT infrastructures to manage their operations, robust colocation data center infrastructure is crucial. Let's look at five key reasons why the need for colocation data centers is growing over time.

1. Healthcare institutions are shifting their infrastructure from on-premise to off-premise.

Many healthcare companies continue to employ legacy infrastructure with on-premise systems, but they are now forced to abandon the current system due to operational issues, such as the frequent need for hardware updates and complicated and expensive upkeep. Another critical aspect is the current infrastructure's lack of accessible room to expand the healthcare center and provide new services to patients.

The current Covid-19 crisis has increased the number of patients who choose teleconsultations substantially. It is believed that around 30% of the world's stored data is associated with healthcare, and this proportion is projected to increase further as healthcare advances. As there are fewer independent data centers in India, enterprises rely heavily on colocation services.

Colocation providers can swiftly supply additional network and physical data center capacity as needed to help healthcare organizations in meeting their growing demands. This allows companies to lease the capacity they need now while remaining flexible when demand increases. Global businesses that wish to have a significant presence in the Indian market are establishing facilities here. As a result, growing global colocation service provider investment is likely to influence the Indian data center industry.

2. Redundancy of colocation networks guarantees 99.9999% uptime.

Local service providers don't have the highest uptime track record, given the lack of adequate UPS and DC refrigeration infrastructure. They also often lack sophisticated analytics which enables existing data centers to be energy-efficient. Since it is to a business's great reputation that devastating system

downtime is, it is not surprising that many enterprises choose a more trustworthy colocation facility infrastructure.

Data centers with 99.99999 percent of uptime experience an annual downtime of fewer than 3.15 seconds. Uptime across colocation providers might fluctuate, but it is the most promising characteristic for a company to evaluate when selecting a data center colocation service. According to the research conducted by Gartner, networking downtimes cost $5,600 per minute. The investment in more resilient room infrastructure might catalyze companies.

Colocation providers can employ multi-site resilience and regional availability zones to reroute traffic and workloads to a new location in the case of a single-site network failure or at the time of disaster. As a result, user downtime is eliminated.

3. Lower OPEX and better resource allocation.

Building an average enterprise data center costs $10 to $12 million per megawatt, which is a considerable financial outlay. This does not stop once the facility is online; keeping a data center functioning daily necessitates significant prolonged operating expenditures ranging from supporting infrastructure to specialized IT personnel to ensure long-term uptime.

Companies that use colocation data centers can concentrate on new product development and business expansion. Instead of worrying about the data center infrastructure and its smooth functioning, the emphasis will be moved to innovation and development. This can also save the IT department a significant amount of time spent monitoring and debugging the on-premise system.

Healthcare companies in India that want to grow their operations and research facilities may save a lot of space and money by leasing their data center needs from colocation service providers.

4. Diverse connectivity options with colocation

As Covid-19 fueled unprecedented demand for internet access — both commercially and individually — India's colocation data center market witnessed a record consumption of 102 MW in 2020. Rising demand, according to JLL India, would offer the real estate industry a greenfield development potential of 6 million square feet by 2023.

Connectivity is needed for this to occur. The right colocation provider offers smooth connectivity options, such as the ability to bring in any carrier without paying expensive cross-connect fees, as well as skilled network design assistance. Colocation facilities give clients easy access to major providers via an exchange marketplace, allowing them to assess a variety of potential options while planning their data center migration strategy.

5. Super enhanced security compliance minimizes the risk

Many businesses, particularly those in banking and healthcare, are subject to stringent regulations and face fines if they fail to comply. Not to mention the operational and reputational concerns that a data breach or other cyber incident may bring. Insurance companies, banks, healthcare IT providers, hospitals, and many other types of organizations hold and manage enormous amounts of sensitive data that hackers target for data theft or ransomware, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Although there's a legal requirement to secure and safeguard customer data, security provides firms with a competitive advantage by hiding their data from rivals. Security precautions mandated by legislation such as HIPAA (for healthcare data) and PCI (Payment card-related data) are the responsibility of colocation providers. Colocation providers utilize several security gates and powerful logical security measures, such as biometric scanners, to guarantee that only authorized workers may physically access important data assets.

The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the urgent necessity to provide healthcare at a rapid pace, whether it is tracking the virus's development, exchanging information on safety standards, teleconsultation, or arranging vaccine programs. With fewer independent data center alternatives in India, colocation is the best option for swift deployments.

Rahi as a Global IT service provider and systems integrator company delivers best-in-class cloud services from the bottom up. We have a global partnership with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix and Ali Cloud. Rahi’s Elevate Services employ a comprehensive assessment process after which a perfectly tailored solution is provided consisting of a hybrid cloud environment with a balanced combination of on-premise and cloud based systems.