3 questions your data center provider must answer
Digital transformation initiatives are reshaping how and where organizations do business, and the infrastructure required to support those initiatives. Those that involve massive data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) must evolve as well.
Consider how some of the most innovative industries are transforming the business landscape:
- SaaS organizations collect volumes of customer, partner, payment, and third-party market data to provide a service or run analytics to commercialize information about the information.
- Retail companies with multiple geo-dispersed locations collect massive amounts of point-of-sale data, marketing information, and supply chain and inventory logs from across their network to build stronger shopper profiles.
- Healthcare organizations, labs, and medical research centers process massive amounts of data from IoT devices and large image files from X-rays, MRIs, and other tools to improve diagnostics and treatment.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) will demand low-latency connectivity and high-availability computing. Delivering service from the edge to the core and back will be critical in a modern world of fast decision-making devices.
- Mobile is reshaping the network community, and 5G and beyond technologies will continue to drive more data at the edge. Consumers are longer tied to fixed ethernet and will increasingly manage their social and business lives through mobile devices.
The modern organization demands agile and flexible digital infrastructure options, and access to data exchange services wherever and whenever means businesses often expect these things to be the norm.
Identifying great infrastructure solutions
Flexible access and hyperconnectivity at lightning pace aren’t the norm among data center providers. Here are three questions to consider when it’s time for your business to leverage next-generation technologies, adopt a digital ecosystem strategy and review your data center solutions:
- How much connectivity? Most providers can offer a degree of high-density data centers and a healthy dose of hybrid IT services, but could they help you dynamically adjust IT infrastructure, easily integrate new technologies or elastically adjust capacity for effective digital ecosystem management? A software-defined interconnection provides rich, secure, and broad connectivity by leveraging dozens of exchanges that enable virtual access to connectivity services, reducing complexity and increasing efficiency to scale and manage network capabilities.
- How much capacity? Businesses demand high performance, low latency, and maximum reliability for their applications, but passing data among large data centers and the edge requires distributed infrastructure and a backbone that can handle the heavy lifting. Just ask: How much can it manage? Can it scale? A high-capacity network solution must start at 100 Gbps and should scale to 400 Gbps to place resources one hop away from where you need them.
- How much care? Did you know that various data center providers are real estate investment trusts whose focus is primarily on investing in real estate? In fact, to maintain REIT status, 90% of these facilities’ revenues must come from real estate assets. A large amount of money is tied up in non-data center activities that these facilities have little capital to reinvest in cloud and managed services and often must turn to partners (i.e., outsource) to offer these services. It makes you wonder just how much attention your data center and network needs will get.
The answers most data center and infrastructure services solutions providers give to these questions may not sound too promising, but there is a way to centralize data ecosystem connectivity with one provider and on one bill.
Infrastructure services for the modern enterprise
In today’s hybrid IT and multicloud environments, it’s critical to work with a provider that has deep knowledge and a strong bench of skilled engineers that can help you develop the right solution for your business. It’s a journey that can’t be solved by one simple solution, and as long as emerging technologies continue to generate new ways to obtain, aggregate and use information, the data ecosystem management and the connectivity to support data transport will have to keep up.
The world’s leading businesses choose a private, secure, and fully managed network that connects them to hyperscale cloud providers, back-office platforms, colocation facilities, or even to the edge of the internet. The reliable, flexible, and easy-to-use Flexential Interconnection Platform features an industry-leading backbone built on top of lit fiber using a Layer 2 network. It can handle the most demanding peak usage requirements and provides high availability and multicloud connectivity.
A dynamic array of distributed digital infrastructure capabilities are built into the platform. A single, trusted provider simplifies resource support, lowers costs, and enables the streamlined management of network services. This is all backed by highly skilled network professionals that specialize in backbone technologies and are supported by 24/7 network operations staff.
