Who is Co-Location?
Co-Location is an organization positioned in the colocation segment of data center infrastructure, providing shared facilities where enterprises and service providers house customer-owned servers, storage, and network equipment with dedicated power, cooling, physical security, and carrier interconnection.
Show more
- Colocation data center space for customer-owned servers and storage
- Power, cooling, and physical security for high-availability environments
- Network interconnection with carriers, cloud on-ramps, and internet exchange points
- Hybrid IT architecture support alongside private and public cloud deployments
- Infrastructure resilience planning, redundancy, and capacity management
More About Co-Location
Colocation services occupy a distinct position in enterprise IT sourcing. Organizations place their own hardware in a third-party facility rather than building and operating a dedicated data center. This model shifts facility capital expenditure toward an operating model while preserving control over servers, storage, and network configuration. In enterprise environments, colocation is commonly used for disaster recovery sites, overflow capacity, latency-sensitive workloads, and consolidation of aging on-premises server rooms.
Architecturally, colocation facilities are built around redundant power paths, typically using uninterruptible power supplies, backup generation, and multiple utility feeds. Cooling designs rely on raised floors or containment systems and increasingly on higher-density rack configurations. Physical security controls, environmental monitoring, and audit processes aligned with frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC reporting are standard considerations for regulated industries evaluating these facilities.
Network connectivity is a central element of the model. Carrier-neutral facilities host multiple network providers, enabling cross-connects, private circuits, and direct access to internet exchange points. Interconnection to public cloud providers through dedicated links can support hybrid architectures, where workloads are distributed across colocation, private cloud, and public cloud platforms according to performance, data residency, and cost requirements.
Comparisons are most useful with adjacent solution categories. Colocation differs from managed hosting, where the provider operates the servers, and from wholesale data center leasing, where a tenant typically occupies larger dedicated halls. Compared with building a private data center, colocation reduces facility construction and maintenance burden but introduces dependence on provider service levels and location decisions.
Business significance centers on resilience, scalability, and capital efficiency. Colocation can shorten time to deployment, support geographic diversification for continuity planning, and provide a path for organizations adapting infrastructure to higher-density compute demands. Directory positioning for this entry reflects the colocation and interconnection solution area within data center operations.
Our description of Co-Location. Updated October 2026.
