In the digital age, enterprises need to ensure that their customers have rapid and seamless access to rich content and real-time data from a variety of devices. This means that companies need to take steps now to ensure optimized end-user experiences going forward.
According to Gartner, the geographical locations of networked data centers will evolve from a centralized mega data center model to one that’s augmented by multiple, smaller sources and sinks of information located in distributed, enterprise data centers, clouds, or hosting providers.
It’s important for businesses to consider this new model to negate latency and congestion by distributing content and compute resources close to the concentrated user-bases and sources of data. In fact, moving the process of content delivery and collection closer to sinks of information and sources (both cloud onramps and offramps) have the potential to create new business models.
We have witnessed this phenomenon with several Acadia enterprise customers who have reaped the benefits of shifting IT infrastructure from a centralized model to a distributed one. By following this approach, they were able to enhance engagement and interaction by bringing content and data center and compute resources closer to user populations, digital ecosystems, and global commerce.
Close interconnections will be critical for businesses to remain relevant
What makes this enhanced user experience (UX) possible is low-latency, higher-performing interconnections. Interconnection in the digital age can be defined as the exchange of private data between businesses.
It’s also at the core of new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) where IoT architecture and applications are built to function independently in silos. So even when we’re considering machine-to-machine communication, we still can’t follow a centralized model.
In fact, it has to be set up to enable the rapid flow of data from dispersed devices located anywhere in the world. To derive optimal real-time value from this data, it needs to be processed, stored and managed close to where it originated.
In the digital edge, interconnections enable proximity between smart devices, users, and cloud services. As a result, companies can benefit from maximum security, privacy, efficiency and performance whether we are talking about connecting with end-users or IoT devices and applications.
Location, location, location!
When it comes to colocation, the future will demand that you push things to the edge to manage the workloads in smaller, distributed, and connected data centers. In fact, edge-based IT environments will be the foundation for innovation and new technology trends like IoT.
As a result, it’s important for business leaders to recognize that a continued focus of IT that’s siloed inside core enterprise data centers is, in reality, an unsustainable strategy for digital transformation. Furthermore, as enterprises grow to target a global customer base, proximity to enable low-latency will be key to ensuring success.
The nature of content today is also far more interactive and rich. For example, within the entertainment space, we see a lot of streaming video coming out of global data centers. But for this content to have a real impact, it needs to be closer to the audience to ensure an uninterrupted experience and the highest performance.
What’s more, the sheer volume of content is also growing rapidly with users trying to connect through a magnitude of mobile devices from around the world. As a result, given the high expectations of end-users, latency sensitivity will be high for digital businesses going forward.
Enterprises will need to get proactive to achieve direct and secure interconnections between their digital products and services and end-users. Many have already recognized this as we are now seeing network and cloud providers move large on-premises colocation centers to cheaper and smaller metro locations.
However, as customers will be highly sensitive to latency, organizations will need to consciously maintain a presence at the edge near a high concentration of user bases to ensure the highest customer satisfaction.
Let’s face it, it’s basic physics!
When you’re attempting to move high volumes of dynamic data and content over long distances, it’s going to significantly impact UX. Furthermore, it can also have a negative impact on your brand image.
So for companies that are aiming to stay relevant in the years to come, adopting an edge presence will be vital to ensure enhanced UX, innovation, and brand value. This means that enterprises will have to start investing in architecture and technologies that effectively address the demands of digital business now, rather than later.
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