Colocation facilities might not initially appear to offer much in the way of security over other types of infrastructure, such as on-premises servers and public clouds. After all, the majority of significant cyberattacks today use software-based attack vectors, which are equally effective regardless of the kind of facility or location in which a workload is stored.
However, it is not safe to assume that colocation is exactly as secure as other types of infrastructure alternatives, neither more nor less. This blog helps you gain a better understanding about colocation, specifically in terms of its security.
Colocation Security Pros
Physical security
One of the prime security advantages of colocation facilities, specifically when compared to on-premises equipment, is their physical security. This refers to physical access to the buildings where servers are housed. Naturally, most contemporary security risks, such as ransomware and DDoS attacks, don’t depend on physical access. Threats like bombing plots, while relatively uncommon, can nonetheless be extremely devastating.
Additionally, public cloud data centres frequently offer very high physical security guarantees. However, this cannot be the same with on-premises infrastructure.
Resiliency
Usually, colocation providers offer power backups and network redundancy options. Additionally, several companies provide managed data backup services for workloads housed in their facilities. While they are not precisely security protections, these solutions do help enterprises in creating infrastructure that is resilient in the face of security incidents and other forms of interruptions.
Despite their high availability guarantees, cloud providers sometimes cannot entirely prevent outages. They don’t provide resources like managed backup, either. You are responsible for building resilience for on-premise systems.
Managed Services
By assisting clients with the planning and managing secure infrastructure, colocation firms that provide managed services in addition to data centre real estate can enhance security. Again, you won’t often get these services on-premises or in the public cloud.
Network control services
Finally, the capability to build extremely sophisticated – and, if needed, highly private – networking configurations is probably the least recognized but most significant security benefit of colocation. You can safely connect workloads in one colocation facility with another data centre, a public cloud, or on-premises equipment by using interconnection services.
Colocation Security Cons
Lack of self-service tools
One of the cons is the lack of self-service security tools that clients can use to check on the security of their workloads that colocation providers often supply. As mentioned above, some providers might provide managed services but not all the necessary self-service security tools.
Of course, colocation customers are free to use any number of security management and monitoring technologies in their settings. But unlike with the public cloud, the tools are not integrated into the platform.
Software security patches
Public clouds may also help with security by relieving consumers of some of their security-related duties. Providers of colocation services also deal with security-related issues, including physical access. However, using managed services in a public cloud won’t usually work with software security patches or secure the bare-metal servers used to host virtual machines (VMs).
Mirroring workloads
The inability to replicate workloads across colocation facilities as easily as you can with a multi-
zone or multi-region public cloud architecture may also be viewed as a security disadvantage. Workloads become less resilient and more vulnerable to specific kinds of attacks, such as DDoS.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there aren’t many significant security differences between colocation and other infrastructure deployment strategies. However, it is crucial to weigh these pros and cons while considering the security option of the colocation centres. However, there are several alternatives and options that are available to help companies overcome these security disadvantages and leverage the full benefits the colocations centres can offer.
Netlabs Global is a leader in providing cloud and IT infrastructure services to help organizations successfully and effortlessly enable digital transformation. Talk to our experts today to learn more about colocation options and how our solutions and services can help transform your business.
