By: Mark Noonan

We are still early in the emerging hyperscale era. Flourishing cloud operations (the public cloud’s revenue is expected to be $552 billion by 2027), digital transformation (which may garner spending of up to $2.3 trillion by 2023) and subsequent data demands are just a few of the drivers exerting influence. As these trends continue, however, large-scale enterprise and cloud businesses are seeking to continually grow their already substantial operations. Now many are finding that they must realign their infrastructure strategies to empower their sustained growth.

To accommodate mounting pressure from new IoT (Internet of Things), 5G or Artificial Intelligence technologies and keep pace with diversifying, edge-centric geographic needs, hyperscalers are supplementing their on-premises data centers with colocation. Subsequently, as the hyperscale entity grows, the scalable data center has emerged as a vital strategic component of these trajectories, empowering massive compute and storage capabilities while allowing for a host of other advantages.

Finding the perfect fit—with room to grow

The defining trait and goal of the hyperscale future centers on attaining massive computing scale, which can then be utilized to support expanding demand from new applications, from end users and from the competitive IT sphere. To get there, however, a number of expectations must be met when it comes to the data center—a foundational element of any digital business framework. This includes items such as design and build capabilities as well as scalability and reliability from both physical infrastructure and end-to-end, holistic expert support. To meet these needs, enterprises are allying with colocation providers at the regional level, enabling enhanced access to customers at or near the edge.

In-house data centers do offer control, with enterprises being able to manage their build and operations from start to finish for tailor-made results. However, on-premises data centers draw huge amounts of resources in the form of both time and capital away from core competencies. Additionally, the potential lack of necessary in-house facility management expertise can get in the way of creating ideal strategies. 

Hyperscalers don’t just require the physical assets. Their demanding growth often necessitates turnkey support from a provider that can deliver comprehensive services from front-end rack and stack, through the structured cabling process and onwards with remote hands support. Colocation data centers offer larger entities augmented control and scalability while substantially reducing the associated distractions and costs from building, operating and maintaining infrastructure in-house. In addition, allying with a regional data center partner better enables businesses to service edge users and execute edge deployments, which is an ever-growing priority for the edge-driven, low-latency future. So, as the search is on for the ideal data center partner and facility, providers are looking for the best ways to meet evolving demand for scalability and flexibility.

A Foundation of reliability and security

Outages are making headlines seemingly every day, and large players certainly never want to see their name, their reputation, or their bottom lines jeopardized by an incident. Unfortunately, the average cost of a critical application failure can now reach up to $500,000 to $1 million per hour. In the always-on world, half of the battle for success is built on staying up. Constant availability is the backbone of any operation and ensuring partnership with a data center that maintains critical uptime is vital.

Finding a data center that delivers this critical and continuous operation hinges on a couple of factors: location and physical security. Especially as natural disasters gain momentum from climate change, data centers are putting a priority on residing above the 500-year floodplain and being built to withstand gale-force winds. To build on this, ideal data center providers are maximizing safety of housed data by providing 24x7 security, biometric scanners, N+1 to 2N redundancy, purpose-built dual power feeds and more.