Choosing A Cleveland Data Center – What You Need To Know

Although Cleveland is not a state capital, it is a major city in its own right as well as a potential gateway to other areas. It can therefore make a lot of sense to implement a Cleveland data center. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know.

Why choose a Cleveland data center?

There are two main reasons for choosing a Cleveland data center. The first is to serve the city of Cleveland itself. The city’s long-established manufacturing sector has now modernized and is increasingly leveraging technology in its operations.

Additionally, Cleveland has diversified its economy beyond manufacturing. It now has many other sectors that are heavily reliant on technology. This includes its healthcare system which is widely regarded as one of the best in the USA.

Cleveland also offers excellent connectivity both physical and digital. Physically, it sits at the crossroads of major highways and near critical business hubs. Digitally, it offers robust and reliable IT infrastructure. Both of these factors mean that Cleveland also makes a convenient base to reach out to other areas in Ohio (such as Columbus) and even beyond.

The city benefits from moderate weather conditions and a low risk of both natural disasters and civil unrest. As a bonus, its status as a burgeoning technology hub provides businesses with access to a skilled workforce and cutting-edge innovations.

How to choose a Cleveland data center

The process of choosing a Cleveland data center can be broken down into five main stages. Here is an overview of them.

Identify your goals and constraints

If you’re thinking about implementing a Cleveland data center, then it’s because you expect it to contribute to at least one of your business goals. You need to define what the goal(s) is/are and what contribution the data center is expected to make to them. Specifying this right at the start of the decision-making process can make the whole process much easier.

This is also the best time to identify key stakeholders and their roles and to set out a framework for implementing and running the data center. For example, you should define your documentation requirements and who is responsible for managing them.

You will also, inevitably, be operating under certain constraints. The two main ones are generally budget and timeframe. You therefore need to define these. When defining your budget, it can be helpful to have a budget for implementation costs plus one for operating costs.

In some instances, location may be a constraint. For example, you may need or want to locate your Cleveland data center near to an operation base or near to your customers.

Define your technical requirements

The starting point for defining your technical requirements is to agree on what type of data center you need. The main options are enterprise, colocation, managed services, and cloud. You might also want to define whether you want a Cleveland data center that has the option to support different service types. For example, you might want a colocation vendor who can also support managed services.

Once you have defined this, you need to define exactly what technical infrastructure you require the vendor to provide. This is also often a good time to define what, if any, technical infrastructure you will provide.

Go into as much detail as you can. For example, in addition to specifying hardware configurations, check power and operating climate requirements. Also, check software and licensing requirements.

Define your performance requirements

The three key factors to define are your requirements for security, compliance, and uptime. While these are separate concepts, they are all closely linked. Essentially, security provides the foundation for both compliance and uptime.

A Cleveland data center vendor should be able to provide certifications to prove their ability to support any compliance programs they reference. They should also be able to back up claims about uptime with contractual guarantees, historical data, and, ideally, a tier rating.

You should also check the vendor’s protocols for ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery.

Assess the Cleveland data center infrastructure

If you’ve got as far as examining a particular Cleveland data center then it presumably meets all your top-level requirements. You are therefore really looking at the finer details. For example, is it carrier-neutral? Does it have robust support for interconnectivity? Does it support a multicloud? How customizable and scalable is it?

Assess the Cleveland data center vendor

Like any business, a Cleveland data center is only as good as the people behind it. This means that you need to evaluate both the experience and the attitude of any Cleveland data center vendor very carefully. The best data center vendors are unlikely to be the lowest cost but they will deliver the best overall value.