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Colocation

Colocation is a hosting arrangement where organizations rent physical space in a third-party data center while retaining full ownership and control of their own equipment. It offers a practical middle ground between fully on-premises infrastructure and outsourced cloud or managed services.

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About this video

Colocation is a data center hosting model in which an organization rents physical rack space from a third-party facility and installs its own equipment there. Unlike cloud or fully managed services, colocation keeps hardware ownership and administrative control with the organization — the data center simply provides the physical environment, including power, cooling, and the physical structure itself. This arrangement is particularly useful when an on-premises facility lacks the space, power reliability, or environmental controls needed to support professional-grade equipment. The key distinction in colocation is the division of responsibility. The data center operator manages the physical infrastructure, while the tenant manages everything running on its own hardware — operating systems, applications, network configurations, and security controls. Some providers offer additional managed services on top of standard colocation, but the core model is straightforward space rental with physical infrastructure support. For organizations that need tight control over their own systems but want to offload the overhead of maintaining a full data center environment, colocation represents a well-established and cost-effective middle ground.

What you'll learn

Describe the purpose and characteristics of colocation as a data center hosting model, including the division of responsibilities between the tenant and the colocation provider.

What's covered

Collocation

What Is Collocation
- Renting third-party data center space
- Alternative to on-premises hosting
Why Use Collocation
- Inadequate local space
- Power issues on-premises
- Avoid managing physical infrastructure
What Provider Manages
- Racks and space
- Power and cooling
- Data center operations
What Customer Retains
- Own equipment ownership
- Full equipment control
- Security configuration

Key terms

Colocation: A data center model in which an organization rents physical space, power, cooling, and network connectivity from a third-party facility while retaining ownership of its own servers and equipment.
Redundancy: The duplication of critical components or systems to increase reliability and availability.
Server: A computer or program that provides services or resources to other devices, known as clients, over a network.

Topics

Colocation Data Center Infrastructure Hosting Shared Responsibility On Premises Cloud Computing

Transcript

When colocation makes sense

Sometimes I want to manage all my own equipment, I want to make sure that it's secure, but I don't necessarily need to manage every aspect. I don't need to manage the air conditioning, I don't need to manage the racks, I don't need to manage some of that physical stuff, which doesn't necessarily have as big of a security impact. Colocation might be a good option for this.

Maybe my local on premises isn't good enough to host my professional equipment. Maybe I don't have a big enough room, maybe they have power issues, maybe there's some sort of issue. So what I can do is hire somebody else. I can put my equipment in a data center and be able to just rent racks, rent space within a data center. We call this colocation.

What you get and what you manage

Colocation is just when we're renting space in a third-party data center. Here on premise I have to provide the room and the rack and the power, the UPS, the cooling — I have to provide it all myself. If it's colocation, they just give me the rack and then I put my own equipment on it. I put my equipment in, and now I still have full control over that equipment and how I set it up, but I don't have to worry about these other areas that I might not feel are as big of a deal, or that I don't really need to be managing.

Usually, typically, in colocation they're managing the data center. There are other services — I've hired out colocation before and then asked them to manage certain aspects of the environment, but that was more as a service provider. Colocation usually is just providing the space and providing some of the basic power and that type of stuff, where I am managing the rest of it.

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