Today, business and IT leaders increasingly focus on leveraging digital technologies and innovation to keep their organisations productive, efficient, relevant, and, most importantly, forward-looking. The need to transform how they do business has led to the proliferation of the technologies like cloud, AI/ML, Big Data Analytics, and IoT; and the current unprecedented situation has made all these technologies mainstream, as enterprises are looking to take advantage of all the digital innovation happening around them.
For organisations to remain competitive, they must embrace digital transformation and the requisite infrastructure needed to achieve it. As business leaders are putting digital transformation at the center of their growth and profitable strategies, the digital infrastructure’s role that manages it has become more important than ever.
This is where flexible, resilient, scalable, secure, and high-speed connectivity that is easy to manage and deploy will not only bind all the pieces of the digital transformation together but also act as the core of business continuity. And the current distributed workforce scenario has further amplified the need for every organisation to be supported by a resilient connectivity solution.
The backbone of digital infrastructure
We all would agree that data is the lifeblood of digital transformation, and connectivity enables this lifeblood to flow. This means data flows through the network infrastructure multiple times, whether it is created in the cloud, on-premise data center, IoT devices, or a remote location. Suppose any organisation is looking to leverage the value and derive insights from this data. In that case, the underlying network must provide the appropriate levels of protection, resiliency, security, speed, and compliance for the data.
And this is the reason why managed service providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and IT services firms are looking to bolster their connectivity resilience so that they can serve and support their customers in the best possible way. Just like cloud computing introduced utility service models for processing power, intelligent network and connectivity have brought flexibility and agility to the way organisations get connected to the world.
As far as data centers are concerned, they are seen as a connectivity hub offering their colocation customers tremendous possibilities while building their networks. The success or failure of any colocation data center largely depends upon the strength of its interconnect options. While enterprises look for cost savings pertaining to power or cooling or benefits associated with data security when they co-locate servers in a data center, the right connectivity services can act as key enabler in transforming their business.
Enabling business agility
In the current scenario, enterprises are opting for carrier-neutral data centers that provide the best option for networking data and help build customisable network solutions. These data centers offer customers access to multiple Cloud Service Providers and ISPs, giving flexibility they need to scale and adapt to changing business needs.
Apart from enabling business agility, carrier-neutral data centres’ network services also address the data connectivity needs of enterprises of all sizes. These services ride on a high capacity, high performance, and neutral network, which seamlessly integrated with a national and global network powered by multiple ISPs, Internet Exchanges, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), carriers, and other network service providers so that organisations can build their communication networks to deliver the optimum end-user experience.
Interconnectivity & low latency is key
Building resilience into the networks any enterprise depends on is more important than ever and that’s why carrier-neutral data centers ensure their connectivity solutions does not fail and, at the same time, help in orchestrating the critical interconnectivity any business requires.
The focus of most of the data center service providers is always on supporting customers to ensure their business is strengthened by secure, resilient infrastructure and fast, flexible connectivity, enabling them to bring their data, applications, and customers closer. In this endeavour, the leading service providers are trying to create a data center interconnect network on a dark fibre to help customers hosted on multiple data centers. This, in turn, will help such customers opt for low latency network.
When we talk about data center connection, everything boils down to speed and performance. In their quest to offer all the advantages to the customers, data center service providers must ensure that the connection is not getting hampered by latency. This is where cross-connections prove beneficial, wherein cross-connect cabling that shares bandwidth between Internet Service Provider and server reduces the number of hops between carriers. By avoiding all other network switches, no extra latency is added, which provides businesses with fastest connectivity possible.
The continued reliance on connectivity
Technological innovations are driving a new paradigm for enterprises and coaxing them to embrace digital transformation. In such an environment, business success is largely dependent upon ensuring a resilient network connectivity.
Most importantly, business leaders must ensure their digital strategy delivers the required RoI, and at the same time, innovation outcomes allow them to disrupt. All these can be achieved by having a resilient interconnectivity strategy. The new normal is that organisations must achieve always-on, always-available secure connectivity across enterprise applications, data, and systems if they strive to compete in today’s dynamic business environment.
From the data center perspective, organisations must go with a colocation provider that offers high levels of data center connectivity. While evaluating data center facilities, enterprises should also assess the interconnect and infrastructure capabilities to ensure they receive the right connectivity solutions needed to grow their businesses and better serve their customers.
