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IT leaders today are juggling a lot. Costs are climbing, workloads are shifting, and teams are under constant pressure to modernize without breaking the budget. For some, the cloud was supposed to be the magic bullet. However, costs can spiral, compliance is tricky, and not every workload belongs in a public platform.
As a result, more businesses are revisiting colocation. Colocation offers the physical resilience of an enterprise facility, including secure power, cooling, and connectivity, while still letting companies own their hardware.
Still, you must decide how much responsibility you want to keep in-house. Do you choose a managed colocation model, or stick with unmanaged?
The decision you make affects cost, control, risk, and ultimately how well your cloud strategy plays out.
Managed colocation means you put your servers in a provider’s facility, and you don’t have the burden of daily maintenance. The provider takes care of items such as monitoring, patching, compliance, and sometimes even hardware replacement. Although you still own the gear, you simply are not doing the heavy lifting.
In unmanaged colocation, the provider gives you power, space, connectivity, and security, but everything else is on you. Updates, operating systems, and troubleshooting are all managed by your IT team.
Which is better? It depends on what you value more: convenience or control. Some organizations can’t imagine handing over the reins. Others are more than happy to let experts handle the midnight alarms.
At OTAVA, we support both paths. For clients that want a safety net, we provide 24/7 remote hands, onboarding help, and compliance-ready facilities. For those with big IT teams who want to stay fully in control, we deliver reliable, secure infrastructure without the extra management layer.
The decision isn’t just about colocation itself but about your bigger cloud picture.
For example, hybrid and multi-cloud strategies work best when you can mix workloads between public cloud and colocated infrastructure. That’s because not every workload benefits from the cloud’s on-demand model. Predictable, steady workloads often cost less in a colocation data center. Meanwhile, cloud services shine when you need elasticity or global scale.
Equinix highlights how many enterprises now deploy private infrastructure right next to public cloud providers. The benefit is obvious: You can shift workloads seamlessly, cut latency, and fine-tune costs. Such a setup gives you flexibility without vendor lock-in.
At OTAVA, our digital interconnection ecosystem makes it easier to build hybrid architectures that combine colocation with public and private cloud. You get the best of both worlds, and we handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Why would a company hand off more responsibility to a provider? Because time, risk, and attention are scarce. An EY survey found that only 47% of IT leaders list modernization as the top priority; 56% point to cost reduction, and 54% to cybersecurity. Managed services touch all three while freeing people, steadying budgets, and hardening defenses.
Downtime isn’t just expensive. It erodes confidence. With managed colocation, seasoned engineers watch your environment around the clock. They tune alerts, apply patches during planned windows, and jump on anomalies before they roll into incidents. Your team still sets direction, but you’re not waking people at 2 a.m. for a failed fan or a noisy disk.
Growth rarely waits for a construction project. A colocation data center lets you start small and expand cleanly. For example, you can add a cabinet, step up to a secure cage, or move into a private suite when the footprint demands it. No new generator to buy. No surprise HVAC work. Just more capacity when you need it.
In healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, mistakes carry penalties. Managed providers operate against established frameworks (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 1–3, ISO 27001) and document the controls. That makes audits more predictable and keeps compliance from derailing product roadmaps.
A colocation data center is more than a locked room. Think layered controls: biometric access, cameras, mantraps, fire detection and suppression, diverse power paths, and carrier-redundant network uplinks. Add managed services, and you gain proactive monitoring, change management, and threat response that aligns with your policies.
We back our platform with a 99.999% uptime SLA. That’s multiple power sources, diverse fiber, and failover tested under load. When workloads are mission-critical, those extra nines are the difference between a blip and a business problem. And because we run the operations, you keep your attention where it belongs: building what’s next.
Unmanaged colocation makes sense when control outranks convenience. You keep the keys and tune everything, including kernel parameters, hypervisors, firewall rules, and storage tiers, to match specialized workloads or tight latency targets in a colocation data center.
It also fits teams that already run data centers: enterprises and carriers with engineers who patch firmware, swap drives, and verify backups without hand-holding. In that scenario, paying for managed oversight can feel redundant.
Cost can tilt this way, too. You pay for space, power, and connectivity, then operate the stack yourself, which is often cheaper over time if you maintain discipline.
The tradeoff includes more weekend change windows, on-call rotations, and inventory to manage. If that’s acceptable, unmanaged buys you maximum freedom.
| Aspect | Managed Colocation | Unmanaged Colocation |
| Cost | Higher monthly fee, but a more predictable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). | Lower upfront cost; potential for long-term savings with a skilled team. |
| Control | The provider handles the infrastructure layer; you control the hardware and OS. | You have complete control over every component and configuration. |
| Operational Burden | Significantly reduced. The provider’s staff handles maintenance and support. | High. Your team is responsible for everything, from updates to emergency fixes. |
| Risk Mitigation | The provider shares the risk, managing the uptime and security of the facility. | Your team assumes full responsibility for downtime and security incidents. |
Some businesses mix both. Compliance-heavy applications may live in managed colocation, while dev/test environments stay unmanaged for agility. It’s rarely all-or-nothing.
Before you lock in a model, pause and reality-check your environment.
Choosing between managed and unmanaged colocation shapes budgets, team focus, and risk. At OTAVA, we guide both paths. Our footprint spans multiple regions, and we offer everything from a single locking cabinet to secure cages and private suites, plus 24/7 remote hands.
Compliance is built in, including HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 1–3, and ISO 27001, so audits are faster and fewer surprises land on your desk. We also help map each workload to the right place: keep steady, regulated systems in a colocation data center; burst or experiment in public cloud; link them through low-latency connectivity.
With us, you get resilient power, diverse network paths, and a partner who shows up when it matters. Ready to simplify the stack and move faster? Contact us to see how OTAVA colocation can help you scale with confidence.
