Colocation vs. DCaaS vs. IaaS: How Governments Use Them in Hybrid IT Environments

What Are the Pros and Cons of Colocation for State and Local Agencies?

Colo can enable agencies to reduce the staff and pare back the resources that presently go toward running an on-premises data center. And colo offers ready access to a level of data-center expertise.

“The location of the data center, access to power, access to network: Those are the main things that these companies do,” says Scott Tease, vice president of the infrastructure solutions group at Lenovo. If agencies need to ramp up IT capacity, “there’s likely not going to be anyone that’s going to be able to do that more quickly than a colocation center.”

Colo can help IT teams make the most of thin-stretched budgets. “For state and local, they’re looking to save on costs, and they see value in leveraging someone else’s data center,” says Stacy Woode, senior client specialist for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. With colo, “there’s no need to build your own data center, the brick-and-mortar.”

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Colocation facilities offer scale, with bandwidth and power available to support on-demand expansion. That can help agencies avoid costly and time-consuming infrastructure overhauls. Still, colocation has its potential downsides.

“You’re dependent on someone else’s data center, if they have enough power, enough cooling and access,” Woode says. “Vendor lock-in may also be a con: If this colo isn’t quite working out, the transition cost is significant to get out of that data center and into somewhere else.”

And colo may not always be readily available. “State and local governments are likely dealing with smaller colocation facilities that are in-region, in-state. They’ve got to turn that new capability on, and it’s going to take a while,” Tease says. “There are lead times to get these things built out.”

How Do Colocation Data Centers Compare vs. DCaaS vs. IaaS?

DCaaS is similar to colocation, but not quite the same. In DCaaS, the servers themselves can be managed by the provider, but are usually owned by the client. With IaaS, the agency has zero ownership of the servers; it just leases the resources.

As state and local agencies explore modernized IT environments, it’s important to understand where colocation, DCaaS and IaaS fit into the equation.

With DCaaS, the agency gets “an environment that’s fully curated for you to deliver an outcome. Let’s say it is some sort of a human resources functionality or finance functionality,” Tease says. In DCaaS, “they’re running those systems for you.”

With this model, “you just need to bring your data and know what outcomes you’re looking for, and those companies deliver the outcome that you want,” he says. “It’s the most turnkey model, but it also has the highest cost.”

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In DCaaS, “the services include continuity and access, the networking, the bandwidth, all of the things that need to be working properly in order to protect the infrastructure,” Woods says.

This model also offers “a sovereign look and feel,” he says. “Especially when it comes to things like AI, you want access to data in close proximity, you want data sovereignty, and you want it to be secure based on any policy or procedure that you may have,” and DCaaS can deliver all that.

Then there’s also IaaS. “I may not want to touch the servers themselves, but I know what applications I’m going to run. I know what software I need to run. I’m going to run that myself. My IT staff’s going to launch things to it, but someone else is going to host that for me,” Tease explains.

Unlike DCaaS, “you’re not getting the services on top of that. What you’re getting is access to hardware that’s ready to run,” he says.

What Are Hybrid Data Center Strategies for Modern IT Environments?

Each of these approaches has its pros and cons. This may lead some in state and local government to lean toward a hybrid approach. Rather than commit to a single data center model, they may opt to leverage the strengths of the different models for different purposes.

Which combination of data center resources an agency uses “depends on the outcome that you’re after from a cost perspective, from a compliance perspective,” Woode says. “It depends on latency, security and sovereignty.”

A hybrid approach can be appealing, because “various portions of the IT value chain are best optimized to run in certain locations,” Tease says

“Every task needs to be thought through: What is the most advantageous way to do it?” he says. A hybrid approach can help align resources to the need.

It can also help to mitigate risk. With extreme weather worsening, “it’s very easy to see a data center there going down,” Tease says, and a hybrid approach builds in resiliency. “A combination of my data center, some co-location and solutions delivered as a service: That’s going to provide the most robust IT access that you could possibly ask for.”

A thoughtful strategy will help to bring that to life seamlessly. “The hybrid strategy is there so that they can have a single pane of glass,” Woode says. “They can focus on business outcomes. They can gain efficiencies from technologies such as artificial intelligence to become more efficient with their process.”

DISCOVER: Evaluate data center solutions for state and local government. 

What are the Roles of BCaaS and DRaaS in Hybrid IT?

Within that hybrid architecture, state and local agencies may also choose to incorporate Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

IT teams don’t need to leverage business continuity and disaster recovery very often. But when they do, those things need to work flawlessly. That makes the “as a service” model appealing.

“You want to make sure that if you get ransomware or malware in your environment, you can go back in the record books six months or 12 months in order to restore an environment that’s safe and secure,” Woode says. BCaaS and DRaaS can deliver that more reliably, and typically at a lower cost, than an in-house effort.

With BCaaS and DRaaS, “you’re not overprovisioning,” he says. “The ‘as a service’ model aligns costs and resources to business outcomes. It aligns to cash flow. It aligns to demand.”

EXPLORE: Modular data centers give state and local agencies options.

For state and local IT leaders, several trends are coming together to bring data center considerations to the fore.

For example, there is increasing demand for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence-driven processes. “It would be way more expensive to do those in the cloud, running at very high utilization rates,” Tease says.

With the rise of smart cities, agencies need more edge computing capability. Agencies may also be looking to repatriate data from the public cloud to support emerging needs around data access and sovereignty, and they may be weighing new security and sustainability requirements.

“State and local governments have to answer to all of that, and they need agility. They need the flexibility to place workloads where it makes sense,” Woode says.

All of that prompts consideration of alternate data center models.