Data centre colocation strikes the right balance between building a private data centre and spinning up applications in the cloud or with a managed service for Carbonite, Rhapsody and Activision Blizzard. One of the main reasons data centre managers from these companies chose colocation over running their own private data centres is cost, though the exact savings can be difficult to determine because prices vary according to the size of the company, network bandwidth, local power prices and the local building environment.

“I couldn't even begin to speculate the costs we save over owning our own [data centre] as it is simply much too significant,” said Keith Archer, vice president of infrastructure and operations for Activision Blizzard Inc., the game publisher behind the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft franchises. “You can't even compare when you take into account redundancy of power, cooling, circuits, etc. … and the addition of headcount. It would be tens [to] hundreds of millions of dollars for an equivalent space.”

Source: Search Data Center