New research from Telehouse, based on a survey of 500 UK enterprise IT decision-makers, shows how external risk is influencing long-term platform decisions. Retailers, catering and leisure organisations depend on always-on digital environments and are increasingly expected to support AI-led efficiency initiatives. Mark White, Head of Business Development at Telehouse Europe, explains how colocation is back in the conversations to give retailers more practical control over where critical workloads sit and how they interconnect.
Availability has always been critical in retail. When checkout, fulfilment or customer apps fail at peak trading, the consequences are immediate: lost revenue and lost trust.
That pressure is becoming more pronounced as digital retail grows more dependent on fast, reliable interactions at every stage of the customer journey. DHL eCommerce’s 2025 E-Commerce Trends Report found that 80% of British consumers will abandon their carts when the delivery options they want are missing, which is a useful reminder that the online experience is judged as a whole, not only at the point of payment.
At the same time, AI is quickly moving from experimentation to operational necessity. In 2025, Salesforce found that 79% of UK retailers said AI agents will be vital to beating the competition by 2026, underlining how quickly AI is moving from experiment to operational priority. That shift is helping push AI into more practical retail use cases, from sharpening forecasting and optimising stock to improving service performance. This growing reliance on AI is being driven by clear commercial priorities. Telehouse’s latest enterprise research, which surveyed UK IT decision-makers, shows that in retail, catering and leisure, AI investment is still closely tied to business outcomes. Improving efficiency and productivity is the top priority for 61% of respondents, with cost savings close behind at 59%.
Where growth meets risk
The challenge is that, as retailers scale these capabilities, the infrastructure required to deliver those gains is now exposed to a broader risk landscape than many retail IT strategies were designed for. In practice, the challenge is not limited to one platform or one environment. E-commerce services, payments, warehouse systems, customer data platforms and AI workloads all need to connect and recover cleanly if disruption hits.
That challenge is being compounded by external pressures. In the Telehouse survey, 86% of respondents say geopolitical risks like energy volatility and regional conflicts are influencing their organisation’s infrastructure decisions, while 93% highlight data sovereignty as an important factor when choosing cloud or data centre providers. For retailers, these are not distant concerns. They can directly affect system stability, costs and where critical data sits. These risks are no longer just theoretical. Energy price spikes, cyberthreats and supply chain disruption are all seen as near-term challenges, each with the potential to impact availability – whether that’s slowing down online services, delaying fulfilment or limiting access to critical systems during peak periods.
In response, many organisations are adapting. Some are shifting towards local providers, while others are spreading systems across multiple locations to reduce risk. However, there is still a gap between strategy and operational readiness. If a primary UK AI data centre were to go offline, more than half of organisations say it would take over an hour to switch workloads to an alternative site. In retail terms, that is long enough for customers to abandon purchases, for stock systems to fall out of sync and for service levels to drop.
There is an important distinction here between having resilience on paper and having resilience that works in practice. Secondary environments are only valuable if failover paths are realistic, dependencies are understood and switching can happen without prolonged disruption to customer-facing services. In retail, even short gaps can affect conversion, service performance and internal operations at the same time.
Why colocation is back in the conversation
For many retail businesses, this is where colocation becomes a practical lever. In simple terms, colocation means placing your servers and network equipment in a specialist third-party data centre, rather than operating everything in a back-office server room or building and operating your own facility. The provider delivers resilient power, cooling, physical security and on-site support.
That is because modern retail platforms are rarely ‘all cloud’ or ‘all on-prem’. They’re hybrids: e-commerce, payments and fraud services, store and warehouse systems, AI services and data platforms all need to connect reliably. A carrier-dense, well-connected colocation site allows direct connectivity to major clouds and network partners, while keeping sovereignty-sensitive or latency-sensitive components in a controlled UK environment with realistic options for failover.
It also gives retailers more practical control over where critical workloads sit and how they interconnect. For organisations trying to balance performance, governance and continuity without taking on the cost and complexity of running their own facility, that can be an attractive middle ground.
What retailers are prioritising next
The survey data also places the spotlight on the trade-offs shaping partner choice. Cost remains the biggest factor when choosing UK data centre partner for sovereignty-sensitive workloads (61%). But it sits alongside control and assurance: 45% prioritise guaranteed UK ownership and governance, and 41% rank a 100% renewable power supply among the most important factors.
Retail doesn’t have the luxury of resilience ‘at any price’, but it increasingly requires infrastructure that reduces exposure, makes continuity plans workable and delivers confidence over where data sits and who governs it. As AI becomes more embedded in retail operations, building on sovereign, well-interconnected colocation foundations is one of the most direct ways to balance efficiency goals with resilience and data sovereignty requirements.
That does not mean slowing innovation. It means giving it a firmer operational footing. Retailers still need to move quickly, test new services and use AI where it improves commercial performance, though they also need infrastructure decisions that reflect a less predictable operating environment. The pressure on retail availability is not easing. If anything, the cost of failure is becoming more visible, while the value of resilient, well-connected infrastructure is becoming harder to ignore.
