Uptime Institute’s latest Global Data Center Survey looked at responses from 900 data center operators and IT professionals worldwide and revealed the major trends that are completely reshaping today’s IT infrastructure strategy. With emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), businesses are now responsible for an unprecedented amount of data. As a result, today’s enterprises are looking for IT strategies that can accommodate constant connectivity and zero downtime. Uptime found this was a key factor driving enterprises to the edge. The major migration is representative of new latency and connectivity demands, as well as a shift toward a mobile, distributed landscape.
Driven largely by the growing adoption rates of IoT applications, edge computing is becoming critical to efficient data processing and latency-sensitive application function. Uptime found that 40 percent of enterprise’s IT teams expect their organization will require edge computing capabilities in the near future. As IoT applications become increasingly distributed and continue to generate enormous amounts of data, boosting edge computing capacity will be paramount. In order to accommodate always-on IoT technology, enterprises are moving away from traditional approaches and toward edge computing to provide more consistent and reliable connectivity for the applications proliferation at the edge.
As these edge applications increase, demand for IT infrastructure strategies supported by interconnection grows as well. The Uptime report highlights this “…data center capacity in enterprises will not so much shrink but fragment from large and often inefficient data centers into distributed ‘fleets’ of smaller, hardened data center ‘nodes.’” By establishing strategic Points of Presence (PoP) at several distributed data center nodes, enterprises can leverage the geographic location of interconnected facilities that support the connectivity demands of latency-sensitive applications. As enterprises make the shift from centralized application environments to a more distributed approach, IT leaders will find that these connection points provide resilient and consistent connection for today’s mobile world.
Ultimately, the Uptime survey establishes that enterprises across industries are migrating computing to the edge where cloud connectivity is available with lower latency and higher reliability. This industry shift is having a significant effect on how IT teams manage and architect their data center resources. These new industry demands will push enterprises to build infrastructure strategies centered around interconnection. By bolstering modern infrastructure approaches with interconnected colocation, enterprises can leverage strategic PoPs that are located in close proximity to the network’s core and provide robust, secure and unparalleled connectivity.
To learn more about Netrality’s interconnected edge data centers, download our whitepaper, The Era of Edge Computing.
