Colocation is not only for large corporations and content streamers. You might be surprised to learn that data center colocation also supports essential services in local and regional communities, helping businesses thrive and making peoples’ lives better.
In today’s digital world, almost every organization you come in contact with depends on reliable networking, internet, clouds and data centers – from police departments and hospitals to grocery stores, schools and libraries. Colocation furnishes vital infrastructure to make it all possible.
Government Services
Federal, state and local governments provide a range of important services including national defense, law enforcement, education and public infrastructure. To meet these diverse responsibilities, the public sector relies on data centers, and colocation is becoming a popular data center choice for government agencies.
The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative directs federal agencies to “prioritize and, to the greatest extent possible, leverage commercial data center solutions, including hybrid cloud, multicloud, colocation, interconnection, or cloud computing ... rather than acquiring, overseeing, or managing custom data center infrastructure.” CoreSite offers all these services – cloud connectivity, interconnections and colocation – and many public sector agencies have engaged CoreSite to consolidate and optimize their data center operations.
CoreSite facilities comply with government mandated security standards including NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2. In addition, CoreSite delivers access to a digital ecosystem with hundreds of cloud and IT service providers including Federal System Integrators and MSPs.
Use Case: Global Aerospace Defense Company
Exemplifying how colocation helps the public sector, a global aerospace defense company – and key U.S. government contractor – decommissioned its on-premises data center and migrated its IT assets to CoreSite's Northern Virginia campus, strategically located close to the nation's capital. The company selected CoreSite for secure, compliant colocation, native cloud onramps and customized access to AT&T's fiber network. In addition, government contractors require a high level of security; CoreSite meets this need, providing advanced access control, biometric dual authentication and 24x7x365 monitoring by onsite security personnel.
Internet, Network and Cloud Services
Internet, networking and cloud services providers keep the community – people, businesses, non-profits and the public sector – connected to each other and the rest of the world. These service providers often rely on colocation.
Use Case: IaaS and NSP Providers
For example, Voxility utilizes CoreSite’s Virginia and Los Angeles colocation data centers to provide North American customers with always-available connections. The combination of CoreSite's Marketplace and Any2Exchange® services offers Voxility seamless internet peering, extending its network reach and performance.
Another CoreSite customer, Atlantech Online worked with CoreSite to add cloud connectivity to its suite of network services. Atlantech uses the Open Cloud Exchange® (OCX) to connect CoreSite's customers to multiple cloud environments. With native cloud onramps in CoreSite's Washington, D.C. facility, OCX enables quickly establishing direct, secure and virtual connections to service providers and the public cloud, empowering Atlantech to connect its customers to their cloud of choice.
Financial Services
Financial institutions support the people, businesses and economies of local communities – and many in the finance industry are turning to colocation for operational advantages. Customer demand for online banking and other digital services has made uptime and infrastructure resilience a must-have for the financial sector. Colocation allows these organizations to move mission-critical systems – like trading platforms, banking applications and customer service solutions – into high-performance data center facilities providing economical low latency, reliability and scalability.
Use Case: Fintech for a Credit Union
For example, a nearly 90,000-member credit union in the Washington, D.C. metro area was experiencing unacceptable service disruptions, and switched to CoreSite to ensure that customers had uninterrupted, secure access to its portfolio of online banking services. In addition, the credit union offloaded responsibility for data center operations to CoreSite, so it could focus resources on customer-facing initiatives that enrich the banking experience, and the credit union's brand.
Security is fundamental in the financial industry. CoreSite’s 24/7 monitored environment and multi-layered security features protect the credit union's IT environment and safeguard sensitive customer data. CoreSite data centers hold key compliance certifications, which help streamline audits and minimize risk for finance organizations.
With direct connections to hyperscalers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, CoreSite also enabled the credit union to easily and cost-effectively expand and adapt its services and operations to accommodate the evolving needs of local businesses and customers.
Healthcare
Healthcare providers depend on digital performance – latency really matters. Even an imperceptible millisecond delay can impact a telehealth conference or a medical device that requires real-time connectivity. Sometimes this can even be a matter of life and death. A robust colocation data center is ideal for critical healthcare IT workloads, ensuring the ultra-low latency and 100% uptime that medical professionals, hospitals and patients count on.
Security and compliance are especially consequential for healthcare because providers are obligated by law to protect patient data. With this in mind, CoreSite offers uncompromising physical security incorporating perimeter fencing, security cameras, biometrics and badge access, and around-the-clock monitoring. CoreSite also maintains compliance with healthcare industry standards including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH).
Use Case: Healthcare Research
CoreSite customer City of Hope in Southern California chose CoreSite's Santa Clara colocation facility (SV7) to ensure 24/7/365 availability of crucial systems so doctors and nurses can care for patients and scientists can conduct life-saving research.
OCX offers City of Hope access to rapid, self-service provisioning of direct cloud connections to multiple providers to fortify redundancy and meet the SLAs required for world-class patient care. The online OCX portal allows City of Hope to directly manage those connections and dynamically adjust bandwidth in response to demand, ensuring City of Hope always has the data center and cloud capacity necessary to serve the region's healthcare needs.
Higher Education
Education is a foundational element of many communities, and cost-effective operation is a key to the success of any educational institution. Staffing, operating and securing on-premises IT infrastructure are becoming cost-prohibitive for many colleges and universities – which often are in urban areas with expensive real estate – driving the academic sector to move IT deployments to more affordable data center colocation facilities.
Use Case: Supercomputing Liquid Cooling
For example, a leading research university selected CoreSite colocation and cloud connectivity solutions to reduce the costs of IT operations while still giving research teams the high performance required for data collection, processing and storage. The university used CoreSite to gain on-demand access to essential data storage and compute capacity with a private direct connection to Google Cloud Platform, and to facilitate data transfer and knowledge-sharing between researchers.
Colocation also aligns with the sustainability goals of most universities by consolidating data center operations in a facility with a focus on environmental impact and taking advantage of cutting-edge “green” technology such as liquid cooling.
Colocation: Serving the Community
Governments, banks, hospitals and schools – these are just a sample of the essential services that CoreSite empowers with interconnected, high-performance colocation data centers. The many real-world examples outlined in this blog demonstrate how colocation facilities are productive members of the community, providing the necessary IT infrastructure for local companies and public services – as well as local branches of global organizations – that support the cities, towns and regions across America.
Know More
Here are three ways to learn more about how CoreSite empowers organizations to reduce total cost of operations, optimize interconnection and become future-ready:
- Check out this overview video
- Research our library of case studies
- - Start the conversation by contacting us
References
1. Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, 2023 (source)