Although a data center network is designed not to fail, it does happen. And if it does, it puts data owners in a precarious situation-especially when it's a colocation facility (colo) that goes down.

As recent situations have illustrated, the ramifications of a colo outage can be devastating. Case in point: two outages in U.K. data centers in July operated by one of the world's largest communications and colo providers reportedly took down 10 percent of voice and data traffic in and around London for more than four hours. Unfortunately for the businesses who operated out of those data centers, their mistaken assumption that they had secured their data in a stable environment led to consequences.