Advantages of Colocation for Gaming Companies

While companies in a wide range of industries could benefit from reliable, high-performance, for today’s gaming companies this is especially true. These requirements are much more than a “would be nice to have” item on the business’s wish list; in gaming, they can make the difference between success and failure.

One way gaming companies can ensure they have IT infrastructure that meets their needs is to partner with a colocation data center provider. Such a strategy makes sense, both to realize the many benefits from offloading on-premises IT assets but also to make better decisions about where to host critical workloads, systems, and data.

This article explores the many advantages the right colocation strategy can provide for today’s gaming companies, paving the way to better experiences, more efficient operations, cost savings, and revenue growth.

The Many Benefits of Colocation in the Gaming Industry

For those unfamiliar with colocation: This is the concept and practice of moving a company’s servers and other IT equipment into a data center owned and operated by a third party (such as DataBank). This hosting strategy reduces the complexity associated with managing on-premises IT assets by moving it to a provider who specializes in maintaining and optimizing data environments.

Colocation makes strategic sense for gaming companies. The first benefit – and perhaps the most valuable – is geographic diversity. This allows companies to choose where they want their data to be located. For many companies, these decisions support strategies for disaster recovery; yet, for gaming companies they choose to host workloads and applications at the edge. Edge computing allows gaming companies to minimize latency, take advantage of 5G, and reach their customers in their target areas for the best experiences possible.

Colocation partners also deliver an entire system of network interconnections for increased access to carriers. These interconnections help further reduce latency and provide better user experiences.

Colocation provides many significant advantages and benefits for gaming companies.

• Improved reliability and uptime: Clearly, it’s vitally important for gaming companies to have reliable, uninterrupted service because freezes, lags, slow speeds, and downtime can have negative consequences for the player experience. These issues also can lead to a bad reputation for the company, which can have a disastrous impact on revenue.

Colocation data centers are designed with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Colocation vendors also provide service level agreements (SLAs), often to the “five nines” – 99.999% uptime – to support reliability and performance. All of this helps minimize the risk of service interruptions and enables the gaming company to provide a stable, consistent service for players.

• Access to high-performance IT infrastructure: Picking the right colocation partner gives gaming companies access to a wide range of high-performance infrastructure options. For example, in addition to space and power, some colocation providers offer a variety of server, storage, and networking options, which can be customized to fit the company’s specific objectives. This includes high-density servers that can manage large amounts of traffic and high-performance storage solutions that can handle massive volumes of game data.

• Enhanced security: Colocation data centers have many layers of physical and network security to help protect against unauthorized access, theft, and cyberattacks. This includes security measures such as 24/7 surveillance, biometric access controls, advanced fire suppression, and a portfolio of managed cybersecurity services. Such a comprehensive focus on security helps gaming companies protect valuable IT assets – and the business itself – from physical as well as cyber threats.

• Improved scalability: Like many other businesses in other industries, gaming companies must be able to quickly scale up (or down) their IT infrastructure to meet constantly changing demands. The right colocation partner can offer the best mix of services beyond space and power to help these companies quickly and easily add or remove servers, virtual machines, data storage, and networking resources as needed. This helps them respond to spikes in player demand and ensure they can provide a seamless and consistent gaming experience.

• Cost savings: Building and managing an in-house data center can be extremely expensive. Choosing to go the colocation route allows gaming companies to benefit from the economies of scale by sharing the cost of infrastructure with other tenants. This means gaming companies can access high-performance IT infrastructure at a lower, more predictable cost than they might face by purchasing servers, related software, and the real estate to house them.

• Support services: Colocation also offers the advantage of access to experienced support staff and other services professionals. For example, colocation data center providers employ teams of highly skilled IT professionals who specialize in maintaining and optimizing data center environments as well as their clients’ workloads, systems, and overall environment. These experts can provide around-the-clock support, ensuring that any issues are quickly resolved, and minimizing potential downtime. This frees the gaming company’s staff from the burden related to IT management so they can focus on core business operations.

With all of these capabilities and business benefits, colocation data centers can be the best strategy for gaming companies looking to better manage infrastructure and even gain a new competitive edge.

To learn more about DataBank and how our colocation data centers help gaming companies – and businesses in virtually every industry – accomplish their most critical objectives, please visit www.databank.com today.

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