Infrastructure at the heart of the digital economy

Hav­ing dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ties is no longer just a part of run­ning a busi­ness, it has become the busi­ness itself. Even the small­est of firms can now oper­ate on a glob­al scale through skil­ful use of tech­nol­o­gy.

Andrew Fray Man­ag­ing direc­tor UK Interx­ion

At the heart of dig­i­tal busi­ness is the data cen­tre. Often seen as life­less grey build­ings, these lie at the cen­tre of UK com­merce. As a nexus for con­nec­tiv­i­ty, cloud, data pro­cess­ing and stor­age, they sup­port a world dri­ven by big data ana­lyt­ics and the inter­net of things on one hand, and data pro­tec­tion and cyber secu­ri­ty on the oth­er.

Before the inter­net trans­formed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, com­pa­nies chose between the likes of BT and Mer­cury to host their crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture. The nature of con­nec­tiv­i­ty was then trans­formed as com­pa­nies were no longer required to con­nect to a sin­gle tra­di­tion­al tel­co, but to sev­er­al diverse net­works.

Every­one is now con­sum­ing a myr­i­ad of per­son­al and busi­ness con­tent on an ever-increas­ing num­ber of devices. To serve end-users with the expe­ri­ence they demand, busi­ness­es need to con­nect to mul­ti­ple net­works and com­ple­men­tary ser­vices, such as cloud plat­forms and con­tent-deliv­ery net­works, to deliv­er their ser­vice. This is where the data cen­tre comes in.

“Our cus­tomers enjoy access to more than 90 dif­fer­ent net­work providers, who they can choose to inter­con­nect with,” says Andrew Fray, UK man­ag­ing direc­tor at Interx­ion, a lead­ing provider of car­ri­er and cloud-neu­tral co-loca­tion data cen­tre ser­vices across Europe. “The main thing about car­ri­er-neu­tral co-loca­tion is that it is a neu­tral point where busi­ness­es can put their crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture and that gives them incred­i­ble choice.”

Not all data cen­tres are cre­at­ed equal. Those that enable their cus­tomers to inter­con­nect to mul­ti­ple net­works, cloud plat­forms and oth­er ser­vices are far bet­ter suit­ed to the mod­ern dig­i­tal busi­ness. These types of data cen­tres are often referred to as car­ri­er-neu­tral co-loca­tion.

These data cen­tres locat­ed in cities are prov­ing cen­tral to the dig­i­tal econ­o­my. They don’t just pro­vide an ide­al envi­ron­ment for a business’s crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, but a place where they can improve the per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy of their busi­ness.

This data cen­tre real­ly is a key loca­tion that con­tributes to the glob­al econ­o­my

The lat­ter is made true by a “cross con­nect”. These cables are the veins and cap­il­lar­ies that con­nect the dif­fer­ent parts of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my. They enable entire val­ue chains to come togeth­er with­in a data cen­tre, and effi­cient­ly move and exchange data to cre­ate “com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est”.

“Birds of a feath­er flock togeth­er,” says Mr Fray. “In Lon­don, back in the day you’d have Sav­ile Row for tai­lor­ing and Harley Street for med­ical treat­ment. Today, we have Tech City in Shored­itch for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

“Data cen­tres are known points of con­nec­tion that draw in a com­bi­na­tion of the key play­ers, skills, per­son­al rela­tion­ships and inter­con­nec­tions between them. This rich mix of fac­tors cre­ates a com­mu­ni­ty of inter­est.”

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

One exam­ple of this is Interxion’s Lon­don data-cen­tre cam­pus, which is home to one of the most-estab­lished data-cen­tre com­mu­ni­ties in Europe. Their finan­cial ser­vices hub is made up of more than 200 finan­cial firms, from banks to mar­ket data providers.

The phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty of Interxion’s data cen­tre in Lon­don, at the epi­cen­tre of Euro­pean trad­ing venue access, makes it an obvi­ous choice for the finan­cial ser­vices sec­tor. The loca­tion yields major speed advan­tages for mul­ti-venue trad­ing strate­gies, and enables opti­mal order book aggre­ga­tion and con­sol­i­da­tion.

The data cen­tre is home to a num­ber of finan­cial exchanges and hous­es all the major points of pres­ence for con­nec­tiv­i­ty to Europe’s major exchanges, mul­ti­lat­er­al trad­ing facil­i­ties and bro­ker rout­ing sys­tems. It also hosts oth­er ser­vices such as mar­ket data providers, bro­kers and cloud plat­forms, which firms can con­nect to with­in the facil­i­ty.

To do this out­side the data cen­tre would reduce appli­ca­tion per­for­mance, and increase laten­cy and costs.

“Enabling this rich finan­cial ser­vices com­mu­ni­ty to inter­con­nect is vital to clients exe­cut­ing on their strate­gies,” says Bill Fenick, strat­e­gy and mar­ket­ing direc­tor of finan­cial ser­vices at Interx­ion. “This data cen­tre real­ly is a key loca­tion that con­tributes to the glob­al econ­o­my.”

HOME OF HYBRID IT

Enter­pris­es increas­ing­ly desire a hybrid IT envi­ron­ment with a cen­tral point of con­nec­tiv­i­ty from which they can move resources in and out of the pub­lic and pri­vate clouds, on-premise facil­i­ties and pos­si­bly also third-par­ty part­ners.

Many busi­ness now use pub­lic cloud ser­vices offered by the likes of Ama­zon Web Ser­vices and Microsoft Azure for stor­age, test­ing and increas­ing­ly for com­pute.

“Our cus­tomers need a key point of con­nec­tiv­i­ty from which they can ‘tog­gle’ between oth­er envi­ron­ments for per­for­mance and secu­ri­ty rea­sons,” says Mr Fray. “They increas­ing­ly use pub­lic and pri­vate clouds, as well as co-loca­tion and their own facil­i­ties to oper­ate their busi­ness­es.

“Data pro­tec­tion is a key issue for most of our cus­tomers. They ques­tion whether they need to keep data with­in the UK or whether it can be shared with the EU. We’re see­ing a very strong trend towards our cus­tomers want­i­ng to keep UK data with­in the UK.”

POWERING DIGITAL ECONOMY

Data cen­tres pro­vide the pow­er, space and cool­ing to run the infra­struc­ture that under­pins the dig­i­tal econ­o­my. The inter­con­nec­tion piece, pro­vid­ed by co-loca­tion data cen­tres, allows com­pa­nies with com­mon inter­ests to locate their infra­struc­ture close to each oth­er so they can work more effi­cient­ly and per­form bet­ter as a busi­ness.

Both con­sumers and busi­ness­es want the resources and ser­vices they use to be dig­i­tal, instant­ly and unlim­it­ed. Co-loca­tion data cen­tres enable com­pa­nies and con­sumers to trade or con­sume with enough capac­i­ty, vol­ume and speed. In doing so, they are cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est.

“Lon­don is one of the three most con­nect­ed spots on the plan­et, so from a dig­i­tal per­spec­tive, it is a front run­ner,” says Mr Fray.

These data cen­tres don’t just under­pin the dig­i­tal econ­o­my, they enable it through inter­con­nect­ing busi­ness­es with their part­ners, sup­pli­ers, cus­tomers, net­works and cloud plat­forms.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.interxion.com