When it comes to the cloud and digital transformation of the enterprise, it's always useful to come back to the fact that physical geography matters to our digital world.
When our new WAN Geography Benchmark got a bit of buzz earlier this year, we thought it'd be cool to invite Principal Analyst Patrick Christian back to the pod to explain how this tool was developed.
It's one of those origin stories where a major customer needed to use several of our databases to run a bespoke analysis of their network. The project sparked a bright idea for how to help other enterprises with their data center decision-making.
TeleGeography’s Cloud and WAN Infrastructure details the international wide area network (WAN) services, cloud connectivity offerings, and cloud geographies of 170 WAN service providers.
Since the 2018 update is now available to our subscribers, we thought it would be a good time to take a closer look at who is connecting to the cloud and where cloud data centers are located based on our latest batch of data.
In short, a colocation center is a data center that provides shared space for network storage and interconnection.
Unlike a web hosting site, a colocation facility provides storage for customers' equipment. The facility typically provides power, cooling, security, and intra-site connectivity, among other offerings.
Cloud computing is dynamic hosting, where users share computing resources allocated on demand from the cloud provider’s servers.
Conversely, colocation is the physical space in which you may operate your company-owned software and hardware. (The joke we like to make is that the cloud doesn’t exist; it’s just someone else’s server.)
You can find more information on colocation and data centers in TeleGeography's Data Center Research Service—the most comprehensive source of intelligence on data center infrastructure and ecosystems. With the Data Center Research Service, you can:
We dug into the latest summary of key findings from our innovative Data Center Research Service to extract three pricing facts we think any colo expert should have on their radar. Here's what we've got.
