I suppose the single biggest point to take into account is financial - this is a business after all!
When the facility you're using (that meets all of your requirements for your business - ie: security, support, service, global reach etc..etc..) becomes more expensive than what it would cost you to run in house once you've written off the capital expenditure of the build then you're onto a winner.
You'll have to consider a large number of factors though - such as staffing, power, cooling, connectivity, management and security.
FOr example, I've worked with businesses that need to have their data centres in different geographic regions. Their annual spend was over $4mil on collocation and bandwidth. Yes, if they could consolidate down into a couple of locations, it would have a great cost saving, but due to the nature of their business they couldn't, so collocation was actually the best fit.
I've also worked on the other end of the scale, where someone was collocating in a single data centre, and were being charged a very large amount which they oculd pull in house for a £500k capex. They already had staff working 24 x 7 and only had to employ a few extra heads to meet the data centre space management aspect.
|