Future-proofing network infrastructure
Author: Joe Peck
In this exclusive article for DCNN, Warren Aw, Chief Commercial Officer at Epsilon Telecommunications, highlights why agile, high-capacity connectivity is the critical ingredient for resilience in an era of relentless digital demand:
Colocation, connectivity, and continuity
In today’s digital landscape, business IT environments are becoming increasingly sophisticated and, with that, more complex. Whether it’s an enterprise working to stay ahead of increasingly digitally savvy consumers, or a service provider keeping those enterprise services and workloads up and running, network downtime is no longer an option.
Downtime is more than just an inconvenience; it’s a major threat to revenue and reputation. For 90% of mid-to-large-sized enterprises, just one hour offline can cost more than $300,000 (ITIC) (£221,000). Despite this, many businesses are still relying on infrastructure that wasn’t built for the scale, speed, or strain of today’s digital demands.
Whether the services are mission-critical or not, a bad online experience can make or break customer relationships in an instant. Customers now expect always-on availability for a wide range of services, such as streaming video content, collaborating in the workplace, performing financial transactions, or accessing cloud services. Business continuity was once a contingency plan, but it has now become a competitive advantage.
That being said, ensuring continuity is also becoming more difficult due to growing data volumes, AI workloads, rising user expectations, and a more distributed business application ecosystem. This, coupled with real-world constraints like power limitations, infrastructure strain, and inconsistent SLAs, is making it more important than ever for businesses to re-evaluate their network and business continuity strategies to stay resilient, particularly if legacy infrastructure is still in play.
Colocation, when combined with agile, high-capacity connectivity, can provide a simpler, smarter way for businesses to keep service access and delivery both online and ahead in a competitive market. Colocation really is more than just racks and servers; it’s an opportunity to future-proof network infrastructure with adaptability, scalability, and reliability at the core.
Legacy infrastructure limitations
As businesses deploy more data-intensive applications, compact edge computing devices, and AI workloads, rising demands are putting increased strain on legacy infrastructure and on-premises environments. This includes:
• Power constraints – Modern applications require newer, high-density equipment, which significantly increases power requirements.
• Downtime risks – Legacy infrastructure and single points of failure raise the likelihood of outages, damaging SLAs, revenue, and brand reputation.
• Business continuity gaps – Without resilient infrastructure and built-in redundancy, organisations face growing challenges in maintaining always-on availability.
• Scalability challenges – On-premises infrastructure can be slow and expensive to scale in response to customer demands or new market opportunities.
• High costs – Cooling, power, staffing, and maintenance are stretching budgets and internal team resources.
• Inter-provider complexity – Managing connectivity across multiple clouds, partners, and carriers is complex, time-consuming, and prone to performance issues without the right interconnect fabric.
These limitations are pushing IT leaders to look for modern, flexible infrastructure strategies that can grow with their business.
Colocation for business continuity
Colocation is more than just renting space in a data centre; it’s a strategic way to strengthen business continuity while simplifying IT infrastructure. Instead of maintaining costly on-premises facilities, organisations can host critical infrastructure in purpose-built, third-party data centres.
This shift not only reduces capital expenditure, but also enables teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. Colocation provides robust power, security, and carrier-neutral connectivity to a global network ecosystem designed to prioritise uptime, resilience, and reach.
One of the key advantages of colocation is dual-site access, which allows businesses to distribute their infrastructure across two geographically separate, interconnected facilities. This setup is vital for disaster recovery and redundancy planning. If one site experiences a disruption – whether due to a power failure, natural disaster, or hardware issue – traffic and workloads can seamlessly fail over to the second site, minimising downtime and ensuring uninterrupted service delivery.
Colocation also supports business continuity by offering high-speed, low-latency connectivity to clouds, carriers, and partners. On top of this, it offers physical security and environmental controls that exceed most in-house capabilities, as well as power and cooling infrastructure designed for high-density, mission-critical workloads.
Beyond continuity, it brings cost-efficiency, operational simplicity, and access to a broader ecosystem of services. Colocation enables enterprises and service providers to focus on delivering value, rather than managing infrastructure.
Mitigating risk, maximising uptime
With increasingly complex IT environments and 24/7 availability becoming the new norm, having the right infrastructure in place is crucial. Colocation offers a practical, scalable way to support business continuity, reduce risk, and stay flexible in a changing landscape.
Epsilon offers colocation services across key hubs in London, Singapore, New York, and South Korea. Each facility provides 99.999% uptime and robust power backup, as well as direct access to our global network fabric of over 500 data centres, clouds, and internet exchanges via our NaaS platform, Infiny.
By future-proofing network infrastructure, colocation can maximise uptime, improve customer experiences, and build new competitive advantages that can support long-term business goals.
Ultimately, colocation provides the stable foundation that organisations need to safeguard operations in an unpredictable world. Business continuity is no longer a backup plan; it’s a competitive differentiator.
For more from Epsilon, click here.
