As data centers develop and evolve with the digital revolution, some businesses wonder where exactly those centers belong. Should they follow the old principles and occupy space in the Valley? Or should they be brought together with other business functions for more effective colocation?

Mark Musselman, VP of Sales and Business Development at Vapor IO, Inc., and Bruce Taylor, EVP of North America at Datacenter Dynamics, talked with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IO Conversation – The Data Center as a Platform event, about Datacenter Dynamics and colocation.

What is colocation?

Data centers are the physical spaces that house an enterprise’s data. Colocation combines multiple functions of a business under the same roof or in the same area. It sounds simple enough, but “things will get more complex before they simplify,” said Musselman.

Colocation helps to maximize an enterprise’s effectiveness by minimizing travel and communication time. To be successful, businesses have to come up with better telemetry, according to Musselman.

Strategy and assets

The way strategic decisions are being made is changing rapidly. Major decisions that were once seen and made by the CIO have now been moved down the stack, according to Taylor. Infrastructure architects and DevOps programmers have more decision-making power because “everything is workload centric,” said Taylor.

Now that data is seen as a valuable asset, decisions regarding data must be made where the data is actually being used. As those decisions move down the stack, businesses will have to “give clear governance models,” said Taylor.

Creating options

As the digital revolution sweeps the world, more and more customers want optionality. Customers and businesses alike are now buying an assortment of services rather a single data set. Colocation would help create a greater synergy within the infrastructure and provides businesses with greater agility, according to Musselman.

The importance of data is growing rapidly and with it the importance of data centers. Colocation can help a business gain the upper hand in an industry where everything is constantly changing, according to theCUBE guests.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of The IO Conversation – The Data Center as a Platform event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE