NEXTDC : Data centre and interconnectivity resilience; imperatives for enabling Hybrid IT

By Steve Martin, Head of Channels

IT services companies have been instrumental in driving digital transformation. By leveraging intimate customer knowledge and innovative approaches to what's possible with technology, strategic partners have led the way facilitating Hybrid IT, cloud migration, data management and interconnectivity.

These technologies are now central to organisational processes. Technology availability, data security and always being connected represent today's greatest risks to business continuity, productivity and prosperity.

Colocation data centres simplify the management of these organisational imperatives and serve as key drivers of growth and innovation.

In a previous blog, I explored five primary challenges channel organisations need to proactively address when supporting their customers growth and innovation objectives. In each case, resilience - the capacity to deliver the business 100% uptime or seamless rapid recovery from service disruption - is at the heart of decision making.

Downtime costs money

Today, downtime must be avoided at all costs. Gartner estimated in July 2021 that systems going offline for one hour cost an average of $540,000. For 33% of respondents to that survey, 60 minutes of service interruption costs $1-$5 million.

This is largely why organisations invest so much and rely so heavily on partners to keep systems available. When technology is at the heart of your operations, metrics and strategy, all stakeholders need access to systems and data 100% of the time. Every second of downtime is lost productivity, revenue and/or brand equity.

Continuity in the digital era is not just about having servers up and running 100% of the time. It extends to security and fully redundant secondary systems. Customer facing and operational environments and networks must safeguard uninterrupted interconnectivity between people and an organisations data, customers and applications. Today's enterprise and government organisations are leaning further into these strategic partnerships with service providers as a form of assurance in meeting their growth and resilience objectives.

Protecting the crown jewels

As data increases in value, more external forces want to get their hands on it. That extends beyond the cyber world. Cyber threats are ever-present but to balance BAU and proactive transformation objectives, partnering strategically is key to instilling the right tools and defence-in-depth protection. Data requires holistic protection - which also necessitates hardening the physical environment (data centre) where it lives. This integrated security mesh must comply with mandated sovereign requirements and only be accessible to those authorised to do so. Getting this balanced and integrated approach to physical and cyber security right is complex and expensive to achieve solo. This is why organisations are increasingly looking to strategic partners equipped to provide ready-made, fully compliant data centres that meet these requirements so they can remain focused on growth and innovation.

Redundancy, back-up and disaster recovery

Business continuity and brand reputation relies on systems being available and interconnected, data being accessible, and the ability to failover and recover promptly. Architecting and then managing solutions that enable this is complex and outside of many organisations' competency remit; which lends itself to the value customers place on this from their ecosystem partnerships. Effective redundancy planning also mitigates against risks of catastrophic systems failure from fire, flood, or other unexpected events. Robust solutions to these challenges are in high demand and are best addressed by premium colocation data centres.

Truly diverse flexible networks

Cloud has driven network complexity many enterprises have not yet fully grasped. Equally, it's elevated the need for an interconnected environment with no single point of failure. Hybrid IT environments are diverse and dispersed, requiring flexible, resilient, and agile connectivity that maintains a continuous data flow. This extends to ensuring complete diversity of connectivity paths and flexible Network-as-a-Service solutions that are centralised and automated. Self-managed visibility and performance monitoring of the network topography removes blind spots, enabling organisations to address major pain points including latency, jitter, bandwidth, and security.

Where to next? As a trusted provider, resilience coaching should continue to be elevated to the top of your transformation services. Partnering strategically with organisations that live, breathe, and lead the way in creating digital resilience forms an equal imperative in enabling and supporting our hybrid IT world.

For questions around how colocation helps our partners support their customers' requirements for 100% resilient data centres, interconnectivity, and digital infrastructure, visit our AskSteve microsite