How To Find The Right New York City Data Center For You

If you want to provide the best possible service to clients in New York City, then you probably need to have a New York City data center. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know to find the right one for your needs, wants, priorities, and budget.

Why choose a New York City data center?

There are numerous reasons for choosing a New York City data center. The most obvious one is that it is the most populous city in the United States. In other words, it has a lot of people who could benefit from the services of a local data center. What’s more, a significant percentage of those people will demand the very highest levels of service.

New York City is not just one of the major economic powers in the USA. It’s one of the major economic powers in the world. The city is a powerhouse in just about every industry sector from entertainment to finance. Many of these sectors are heavily reliant on data-center services. In fact, some of them demand services in real-time (or very close to it).

In general, the easiest and most effective way to meet their expectations is to implement a local New York City data center. This allows organizations to leverage NYC’s excellent infrastructure and its large pool of skilled workers.

What to look for in a New York City data center

Here are the five key points you should consider when looking for a New York City data center.

Location

If you’re spending the money on implementing a New York City data center then it’s probably because you want (or need) to serve customers in New York City. In general, therefore, you want to be as close to your customers as possible. This ensures the fastest possible speed of delivery, which is essential for some industries and highly desirable in others.

The potential exception here is if you’re serving customers who are spread out in different parts of the city. There are three possible approaches to dealing with this situation.

Firstly, you can use multiple data centers. Secondly, you can choose a New York data center near a network hub, preferably one that’s central to your customers. Thirdly, you can locate near your top-priority customer(s) and accept that other customers will receive a lower level of service.

Security and compliance

Overall, New York City is a fairly safe environment. With that said, it is still a city with all that implies for security. It’s therefore vital that any New York data center has robust physical defenses as well as effective cybersecurity.

Those physical defenses should run from the perimeter of the data center to its core. In other words, nobody should be able to get anywhere they are not supposed to be. This includes by accident as well as on purpose. Even so, all movements within the data center boundaries should be monitored and logged.

It’s also important to check that a New York data center vendor supports any compliance programs that are relevant to you. It can also be reassuring if they are certified in broader data security frameworks such as ISO 27001.

Network connectivity

This is likely to be a huge issue for any organization looking to implement a New York City data center. In addition to looking at the headline statistics on speed and latency, you should also check the details of the vendor’s network infrastructure.

For example, do they have support for carrier-neutrality, interconnectivity, and multicloud architecture? These are benefits in any data center and are likely to be especially relevant to a New York City data center.

Reliability

A New York data center vendor should provide an uptime guarantee. This essentially states what percentage of time their data center will remain operational per given period. At a minimum, this should be close to 100%. In some cases, only 100% uptime will be acceptable.

The vendor’s guarantee should be contractually enforceable. Even so, it’s reliable to assess how likely it is that the vendor will be able to make good on it. To begin with, you should assess the data center’s tier rating and its historical performance data.

You should also quiz the New York data center vendor on the steps they take to ensure uptime. These would include their disaster-preparedness along with their protocols for incident management, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

Cost and pricing structure

While headline cost matters, pricing structure is at least as important. Essentially, the vendor’s pricing options should be a good fit for how you organize your finances. It’s also vital that there is full transparency on what the vendor charges.