If you are the owner or manager of a business like a small credit card company, a credit union, or a medical insurance company, then you likely have a great deal of customer data that needs to be stored at any given time. This may also be true of countless other businesses, and this storage may be imperative to keeping your customer base and keeping their personal information as safe as possible. While you may have servers on site that can handle the data, you may soon find out that these servers just cannot handle your storage needs as your business grows. A remote data center can help you with this, but you will want to make sure that you consider the right physical location for this business.

Think About Natural Disasters

Many data centers will install special systems in their businesses to make sure that data and servers are protected from damage. You will want to make sure that state of the art cooling is utilized with hot and cool air exhausts that face each other along the rows of servers. Systems that directly suck up hot air exhaust and force cool air against server intakes are a good option too. You also should find out if a fire suppression system that uses either inert gases or clean chemicals to snuff out a fire are installed. These systems along with maintained fire and smoke detectors are ideal.

Natural Disaster Areas

While issues with overheating and possible fire outbreaks are huge concerns that need to be considered, you also need to think about the natural disasters that could possibly destroy the data center site. A disaster like a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake could mean the loss of all data without a way to restore it. If the data center you consider is far from home, then consider the fact that tornadoes are most common in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida. An earthquake is most likely in the states of California, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Washington, and hurricanes are likely to hit the states of Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana.

This information does not mean that you should skip the data center in Florida or Texas, but it does mean that you should do your research and look into the specific city or region where the data center is located to see if a natural disaster, like the ones common for the state, has affected the area in recent years. Additionally, make sure to consider snow and ice storms that may not destroy the data center but can affect downtime during the winter months. 

Consider Infrastructure

If you decide to use a data center that is somewhat far from home, you will still expect to be able to access your data quickly and whenever you choose. While the data center may invest in the largest servers and offer personal tech support when networks are not working, the center will still be at the mercy of available internet speeds in the area. If the center is lucky enough to be located in a state like Oregon, New York, Florida, California, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, or another state where millions of people have access to fiber-optic internet, then this may not be an issue. This is especially true since the fiber-optics offer upload speeds of at least 500 mbps. 

However, if the data center is located in an area where there have not been any investments in updating the internet infrastructure, then both download and upload speeds will be slow. Many of these areas are located in the Midwest where populations are spread out across the state and there are very few densely populated cities. Internet service providers simply do not have enough customers in some of these areas to invest money in broadband Internet lines, let alone fiber-optic ones. To make sure that you can access data quickly, ask about the speed of the internet provider the data center uses, not about how much data the servers can potentially handle. 

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