Digital Realty
Nurturing Connected Data Communities

As organisations continue to press forward in their digital transformation journey, a shift in thinking and approach is required for a successful transition toward a digitally-driven data centric architecture. To stay ahead in the extremely competitive business environment, they are rapidly employing data analytics, artificial intelligence, and Internet of things (IoT) technology, driving exponential growth of data volumes produced, processed and distributed. The foundation of these new technologies resides in a combination of cloud & carrier platforms, data centres and edge devices. With ever-increasing users and endpoints across an organisation's networks, the complexity of connecting these distributed data locations is ever-increasing. Businesses must now consider that data has gravity, which means that movement of data is complex and expensive.

Additionally, as more and more organisations adopt hybrid IT deployments that incorporate a mixture of public and private cloud, the problem becomes even more complex. Frequently, organisations’ legacy on-premise data centres prove inadequate to cope with the demands of modern-day digital infrastructure. Colocation data centres provide the ideal environment for organisations to solve the data gravity challenge, by interconnecting private cloud deployments in the facility with the cloud and carrier platforms of choice, utilising the cloud onramps and connectivity options available in these facilities. This connected data community approach allows organisations of any size to implement a secure, hybrid, and data-centric architecture globally at points of business presence.

This is where Digital Realty comes into the picture, offering innovative solutions to support data centres, colocation, and interconnection strategies for organisations across the globe. The company helps organisations interconnect distributed global workflows within rich, connected data communities across a global platform of 291 data centres in 24 countries.

“As the largest global provider of multi-tenant data centre capacity, we have a unique vantage point on how technology infrastructure is built, deployed, and operated”, states Vincent in ’t Veld, SVP Platforms Business Segment – Cloud and Digital Media, Digital Realty.

Digital Realty offers a versatile solution, PlatformDIGITAL®, which helps organisations create a global, scalable IT infrastructure to meet their business goals. It enables global distributed workflows at centres of data exchange to help organisations scale digital infrastructure and succeed in their hybrid multi-cloud strategy. “PlatformDIGITAL® is a first of its kind global data centre platform that enables customers to scale digital business by transforming their IT infrastructure so that they can operate ubiquitously and on-demand with real-time intelligence,” says Vincent.

Furthermore, the platform solves Data Gravity challenges by 'bringing users, things, applications, clouds, and networks to the data at centres of data exchange.' PlatformDIGITAL® provides a trusted foundation to solve business-critical challenges associated with global coverage, capacity, and connected data communities, with tailored infrastructure deployments and controls matched to business needs irrespective of data centre size, scale, location, configuration, or interconnections. It delivers a consistent experience, security, and resiliency that allows organisations to operate deployments as a seamless extension of any global infrastructure.

"By enabling our customers to adopt a consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure, which is fully integrated with PlatformDIGITAL®, we can enhance their data traffic flow and help them to overcome challenges such as data residency, Data Gravity, and local data processing," explains Vincent.

For example, we have partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer an enhanced hybrid cloud infrastructure experience with AWS Outposts.

AWS has validated a select set of Digital Realty global facilities, to ensure redundant power and network connectivity, sufficient physical security, rack support, and cooling. This allows customers to deploy Outposts to the company’s facilities faster and easier.

Globally, PlatformDIGITAL® offers access to more than 40 AWS Direct Connect locations, including 16 in EMEA providing customers with secure, high-performance access to the desired AWS Region using either physical and virtual connectivity.

“Together, PlatformDIGITAL® and AWS provide a global, flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure that is easy for customers to set up, connect to a global community of partners, and future-proof for whatever business needs they may have,” says Vincent.

Moving forward, the company continues to work closely with customers to predict and meet their ever-growing demands “Our continued focus at Digital Realty is based on our Connected Data Community approach, which focuses on equipping enterprises with the tools they need to overcome Data Gravity challenges and shift to a data-centric architecture,” concludes Vincent.