By Amit Agrawal
As the world around us continues to transform into an intricate web of interconnected data, few people realise the potential it holds. Organising a flow that influences individual customers and large economies could very well be the end game for almost every organisation out there.
To think in numbers, almost two-thirds of the global population are interconnected through the Internet. That’s 4.9 billion people exchanging information on a daily basis. With this amount of massive volume in play, comes a plethora of challenges in managing the data.
Physical Infrastructure Siloes
The Internet behests onto IT infrastructures. Most data and digital systems are disparate and managed through unique stakeholders, creating compartmentalised silos. This makes it challenging to get these diverse groups to talk to each other, let alone foster any collaboration.
The overarching focus is finding that one silver bullet that repairs the Internet is far from easy. Also, the Internet demands a more complex and comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach. These silos do not have a shared language to talk about problems.
A related aspect is the cost of setting up and maintaining disparate systems.
Issues Interpreted To Be Isolated
Often, crucial aspects of the Internet get interpreted in isolation. In reality, however, the issues tend to be multi-faced and intertwined. Currently, these issues do not get perceived as a collective. Even worse, the cascading effect of one issue spiralling into and impacting other elements, leading to a domino effect, is far from being addressed.
The principles and values need to get embedded across all Internet-driven layers and not fall prey to focusing on a narrow slice of the whole pie. Although creating fair decision-making protocols is essential, state-of-the-art services require one to take an extensive scope, beginning at the infrastructure level.
Sustainability and Scalability
A pressing concern for today’s Internet-first world is ensuring sustainable and scalable infrastructures that can contribute toward a circular economy. To this end, the challenge that comes crumbling down is the environmental footprint – from the immense amount of energy usage by Data Centers, new-age advancements such as blockchain, and the cost of mining processes that render sought-after functionality to our devices and gadgets.
Cybersecurity
Today, businesses conduct their operations through Data Centers that host a broad range of complex, mission-critical Big Data and applications. Moreover, these get tasked with storing proprietary information, including customers’ personal data and intellectual property. Given the severity of these aspects, enterprises must ensure that security protocols get implemented. A lack of adequate measures can make the digital ecosystem susceptible to data breaches.
Moreover, data breaches have become increasingly expensive. They are financially nerve-wracking, but, more so, the overall reputation of the corporate brand, too, gets affected. The failure of adequate data protection measures can culminate into a legal battle through endless lawsuits and litigation, leading to a downgrade in credibility and customer confidence.
Plus, the speed of technological advancements too can contribute to this threat. Virtualized Data Center technologies call for Data Center security at the infrastructure layer.
To this end, when protection gets integrated with software, a fine-grained security approach is backed with agility and adaptation. Another aspect is industry standards! These too assist in the design, construction, and maintenance aspects to ensure state-of-the-art data protection.
The Solution: Advanced Data Centers
Advanced Data Centers (DCs) are an embodiment and stand to benefit IoT, 5G, and Hybrid Computing. The crux is that the voluminous data requires faster processing and scalable storage space. These DCs render higher speed and security, enabling data networks to expand rapidly by allocating greater bandwidth and power.
The standout benefits are that the DCs deliver reliable uptime, low latency connections, connectivity to multi-Cloud environments and on-demand scalability.
The crux of Colocation is that operators can put their facilities in proximity to the users, enabling them to offer cost-efficiency, scalability, lower latency and faster network connectivity. To this end, businesses get to save their expenditure on computing, networking, and storage space, with no compromises on reliability, speed, and security.
You’re essentially looking at:
- Scalability, both horizontal and vertical, according to business needs
- High-powered and intense data storage capabilities
- State-of-the-art security mechanisms and procedures
- Availability and accessibility to Multi-homed Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) bandwidth.
(The author is Amit Agrawal, Chief Business Officer, Web Werks – Iron Mountain, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
