As organizations continue to adopt hybrid cloud architectures for their IT infrastructure, balancing flexibility, cost, and performance, many are discovering that colocation still plays a crucial role in optimizing their IT strategy. They discover that leveraging colocation as the strategic foundation to bridge their on-prem systems with cloud services creates a more resilient, performance, and cost-effective IT environment.
IDC’s 2024 Cloud Adoption Survey shows that 93% of IT leaders in APAC are rethinking their cloud strategies, with nearly half focusing on hybrid cloud for its flexible yet secure approach. And globally, spending on public cloud infrastructure was forecasted to reach $723.4 billion in 2025, a 21.5% increase over 2024 (Gartner, 2025).
With the growth of cloud spending and the increasing focus on hybrid strategies, colocation provides a robust foundation to navigate the complexities of modern IT environments, ensuring resilience and scalability for future growth.
Understanding the Colocation-Hybrid Cloud Synergy
Typically, hybrid cloud strategies involve the integration of private cloud, public cloud, and on-prem systems. Colocation facilities serve as the physical anchor point where these different environments converge, providing the foundation that enables seamless connectivity and low-latency connections between businesses and end-users including direct connections to multiple cloud providers, eliminating the unpredictability of internet-based connections whilst providing dedicated, high-bandwidth connection between private and public cloud resources. At Leaseweb, our Cloud Connect service delivers these private links to reduce latency, lower egress costs, and boost workload performance and security.
Colocation also provides organizations the capability to maintain physical control over the most critical infrastructure, while still leveraging the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud, especially for applications requiring ultra-low latency, data privacy or regulatory compliance.
Strategies for Optimization
The key to successful colocation-hybrid cloud synergy lies in understanding how to architect systems that leverage the strengths of each environment considering where data is generated or frequently accessed, the network architecture and workload distribution.
Data accessed frequently could remain in colocation facilities where latency can be minimized with increased performance while less frequently accessed data can be stored in public cloud where cost efficiencies can be realized. User-facing applications might run in public cloud to leverage global CDNs or Multi-CDNs and auto-scaling capabilities, while database and transaction processing remain in colocation or private cloud environments to ensure consistent performance while keeping the data local. Implementing redundant connections between the colocation infrastructure and the cloud platforms ensures high availability with adequate load-balancing possibilities, improving overall performance.
As AI and GPU-driven workloads surge, colocation’s high-density power and cooling capabilities are becoming essential due to the high-speed real-time processing, workload scale, power and cooling requirement.
See the infographic below for a visual overview of how colocation fits within a hybrid cloud model.
Copernica’s hybrid cloud journey
Copernica’s adoption of a hybrid cloud environment, powered by Leaseweb’s Colocation and Private Cloud has transformed its ability to manage the vast data generated by its email marketing platforms, including Marketing Suite, MailerQ, and SMTPeter. This strategic integration of colocation and cloud infrastructure has enabled seamless scalability, enhanced business continuity, and doubled cloud network usage, ensuring robust performance. By leveraging a secure, redundant, and scalable network, Copernica has established a resilient IT foundation that supports its growth and optimizes data processing in an increasingly data-driven landscape.
The Bottom Line
Colocation complements cloud services rather than competing with them. The key to success lies in understanding the unique strengths of each environment and architecting solutions that leverage these strengths appropriately. Organizations that take a strategic hybrid approach can achieve significant benefits including improved performance, reduced costs, enhanced security, and greater operational flexibility.
As AI and high-performance workloads grow, colocation will only play a bigger role in the hybrid landscape. The question isn’t if enterprises should combine colocation, private cloud or public cloud, it’s how soon they can start.