Companies smarting from the high costs of bandwidth and lack of proper power and cooling looked for a solution. Several telco companies, already equipped with access to an Internet backbone, began providing space for clients to bring in their own hardware. Armed with new hardware and rapidly developing e-commerce software for both internal and external uses, many companies moved to Colocated facilities to take advantage of the more burstable, less expensive bandwidth and conditioned computer environments. Under this model, companies still purchased and maintained all their own hardware, software, and personnel to manage these resources. The co-location company is responsible only for providing a wire cage to store the equipment, as well as power, cooling, and bandwidth to each cage.
Customers are still responsible for their own security and network management.
One drawback to this model is the inherent security risk that occurs from so many different people being in such close physical proximity to each other's hardware. The other huge security risk is that the network is wide open from a security perspective. While many collocation providers offer security consultants, the entire network is still very vulnerable to an attack from other collocation customers. Without a network designed from the ground up for security a consultant's solution is little more than a band-aid. This is evident by the dozens of successful attacks into collocation facilities by hackers.