Unlocking New Opportunities at the Edge

Alex Tam, Managing Director, Equinix Hong Kong

Alex Tam, Managing Director, Equinix Hong Kong

When Gordon Moore made his famous statement in 1965 that the numbers of transistors incorporated in a chip will double every two years, he could never have anticipated the exponential growth in data in the past50 years.

According toa recent research from IDC, 77 percent of organizations reported that in the past 12-24 months they have expanded the number of data types and sources beinganalyzed to make strategic, operational, and tactical decisions. The explosion of data that we create and copy, from 7.9 zettabytes in 2015 toan estimated 44 zettabytes by 2020,is causing enterprises to ask: “Is my data warehouse capable of handling this rapid growth?” and,“How can I extract actionable insights from this gigantic amount of data in real-time while remaining cost-effective?”

IDC notesthat in today’s data-driven economy, enterprises are becoming increasingly reliant on cloud, mobility, big data/analytics, and social networking. Thisin turn is putting pressure on IT to deliver business value at a faster and greater scale; uncovering new and effective sources of revenue growth, driving operational improvements, and engaging the customers in

a new and more personalized manner.

"Re-architecting IT infrastructure is not an easy task, particularly for companies that have multi-tenant data centers, multiple clouds and analytics tools"

Whilst digital transformation is forcing enterprises to move mission-critical business processes and applications to ‘edge’ locations - close to data sources and end-users -many companies find that their IT infrastructures cannot support moving computing applications, data, and services away from centralized nodes to the logical extremes of a network.

Having encountered this vast amount of data and mounting requests foranalyticsfrom various business functions, enterprises have now come to realizethat the next logical step of IT innovation is to re-build their legacy systems based on Inter connection-oriented Architecture (IOA), where connections between people, locations and clouds are enabled and data can be processed and analyzed quickly at the edge locations. IOA has the power totransformthe face of enterprises, integrating the physical and virtual worlds in which they operate.

With IOA, companies can enjoy greater agility and deliver a richer user experience that provides actionable insights through collaboration with partners and suppliers in a real-time, secure and cost-efficient manner.

Re-architecting IT infrastructure is not an easy task, particularly for companies that have multi-tenant data centers, multiple clouds and analytics tools scattered cross numerous locations. Finding the right and suitable partner to help manage this relentless on slaught of data is some thing enterprises are seeking to address, with many turning to data centerproviders to provide the rich networks and global footprintsneeded tokeep huge amounts of data close to users, services providers,analytics engines and partners.

The future data of management lies in a centralized multi-tenantplatform built on Inter connection-Oriented Architecture. Here enterprises can reap the benefits brought by big data and IOT, while unlocking new business opportunities by utilizing locally optimized data and metadata repositoriesto deliver insights to people when and where they need it.