Water is essential to life. It covers 71% of the earth’s surface, mostly in seas and oceans, and it plays a vital role in the world economy. Many industries are dependent on water for production and trade, and it’s an important source of economic, social and human development.

What was physical is rapidly becoming digital, as every industry undergoes a digital transformation. Digital wallets, with details about your identity and your credit card information encrypted somewhere in the cloud, are replacing credit and debit cards, which have largely replaced printed currency and checks. Newspapers, magazines, music and movies are consumed digitally. Robotics eliminate manual assembly processes and deliver consistent quality at lower cost. The notion of driving a car may soon become as outdated as dialing a phone.

Cloud computing has unleashed a whole host of innovation, on-demand usage and collaboration options that companies are looking to take advantage of. However, ‘cloud’ is not a one-click panacea.

As game developers gather in San Francisco this week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC)[iv], they will be discussing the latest in interactive, online gaming platforms along with innovations in advanced graphics, mobile networking, voice recognition and accessibility, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR).

The Equinix Partner Program is a rich ecosystem of top providers who help customers design and deploy optimal multicloud solutions—whether public, private or hybrid. Our partners collaborate with us to deliver integrated solutions, tailor-made to fit customer needs.

The word ‘disruption’ certainly causes concern for those running established businesses. Yet if we put aside fear of uncertainty, we find digital ‘disruption’ brings with it far-increased business opportunities. Rather than abandoning original business principles, companies can use technology to build on them, bringing core values and past successes to the world’s digital economy stage.

In Sydney we’re preparing for the launch of our eighth data center, named SY5 – a US$160 million (approximately A$224 million) investment for Equinix. In Perth, we’ve spent almost US$10 million (A$15 million) to expand our PE2 data center over the past year, while today in Melbourne we announced the development of ME2, an initial investment of US$84 million (approximately A$117 million).

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, the team at Equinix is embracing this year’s theme “Balance for Better” --  and encouraging women around the world to take action to promote gender parity, celebrate the achievements of women, and push for the success they desire.

When compute processing, content and data move to the cloud and data sources become more geographically dispersed, protecting those assets can be a challenge. Security controls need to extend out to the edge to deliver robust and reliable data and application privacy, protection and compliance.

The recent unveiling of the Greater Bay Area blueprint by China’s State Council has ignited lots of conversation across Asia-Pacific about the impact of emerging technologies, the entrance of new players and the importance of connectivity and expanded partnerships with existing providers to support the growth of technology in the South China region.