IT infrastructure has gone mainstream. As 2024 comes to a close, it’s now widely understood outside the IT industry that data centers play a vital role in everyday life. They provide critical infrastructure that enables everything from online shopping and financial transactions to healthcare, digital communication, social media, emergency services, transportation and much more. While data centers have been around for a long time, we need them more than ever in today’s data-driven world.
Perhaps you remember this quote from the popular children’s book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss: “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.” Well, in 2024, it’s IT infrastructure that’s everywhere. There are thousands of data centers around the world—in nearly every country, on nearly every continent—making countless critical functions of daily life and business possible.
Thanks to digitization, data has become one of the most important commodities in our world. For the majority of organizations, it’s their most valuable and precious resource. So, when companies put their compute, storage and networking infrastructure in a data center, they know they’re entrusting it with something vital. Only with the help of data centers can they fulfill their purpose and achieve their business goals.
How the world of infrastructure is changing
In the tech space, things tend to move very quickly, and that’s certainly been true for data centers in the past few years. AI is unlocking new efficiencies and new forms of value creation for enterprises. It’s accelerating innovation across industries. The amount of data being generated and processed for AI requires a lot of computation power. As the sheer volume of data now moving through data centers increases exponentially, so too does the need for compute power. As a result, data centers are being driven to innovate on how to deliver the required processing power, data storage and connectivity.
While the demand for data centers is growing, so too is global interest in environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. These concerns continue to be a priority for enterprises even as they scale up their AI initiatives. Thus, data centers are also innovating on ways to increase efficiency and invest in renewable energy. The need for more power is fast-tracking renewable energy innovation, and the industry is exploring more wind, solar, hydropower, hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear energy options to power data centers.
These trends aren’t the only ones influencing data centers. AI and access to renewable energy have certainly topped the headlines this year, but edge computing, multicloud architectures, geo-redundancy, data security and privacy, and increasing reliance on partnerships are all shaping the data center industry and the way organizations think about infrastructure and workload placement. Partnerships are more vital than ever to business success, and finding trusted clouds, SaaS providers, network service providers, and of course data centers is a high priority.
Putting infrastructure in all the right places
While these trends shape the future of digital infrastructure, organizations on the ground are making important decisions about data center location strategy and workload placement. Where you put your infrastructure or a given workload can have a big impact on application performance, costs, efficiency and so much more. There can’t be a universal strategy for how to properly distribute infrastructure resources and workloads since the needs of every company are different.
Perhaps that’s part of why we have so many ways of talking about the location of IT infrastructure in the data center industry. On a global scale, infrastructure is just about everywhere. When you zoom in to look at infrastructure location for a given organization, you might consider terms like:
- On-premises and off-premises, to express whether it’s on company property or remote
- Distributed, to show the transition toward multi-site IT architectures
- At the edge, to articulate proximity to user communities or population centers that are in locations other than company headquarters
- In the cloud, to refer to typically remote infrastructure that utilizes shared resources (public cloud) or dedicated resources (private cloud)
- Cloud-adjacent, to indicate proximity of private resources to the public cloud
The reality is that most companies today deploy a variety of infrastructure solutions in a variety of places. Distributed architectures are the norm, as are hybrid multicloud models. When choosing data centers, geo-redundancy is important to ensure business continuity in light of potential weather- and climate-related disasters. Companies also need to be near their ecosystem partners to exchange value.
And then there are workload-specific considerations: Businesses are thinking carefully about what data they most need to control and protect, and what workloads need to be at the edge near their user communities. Data sovereignty is a factor, too: Regulations in some places require keeping data in the country where it’s generated. There are workloads that require ultra-low latency, such as online gaming or financial trading. And if you’re doing AI, it’s crucial that your data center has access to power and to the advanced cooling capabilities AI demands.
Choose an infrastructure partner that enables your future
Data centers are the engine room of the economy, underpinning economic growth. As IT infrastructure evolves to support next-generation workloads and applications, it’s even more important to have trusted partners to help you design the best infrastructure for your needs. That means thinking through what you’re trying to achieve and which partners can help you with those goals.
Equinix has been operating data centers for more than 26 years, and we’ve helped 10,000+ enterprises address their infrastructure requirements to take their companies to the next level. Our high-performance data centers have the global reach, cloud access, interconnection and ecosystem to best support global organizations as they explore next-generation technology. Migrating from an on-premises data center to Equinix can help you connect to the right partners in the right locations, ensure low-latency connectivity at the edge, prepare for AI adoption and meet your sustainability goals.
Data centers are likely to remain the backbone of a digital world for many years to come, so choose a data center provider that will serve as a strategic enabler, helping you future-proof your infrastructure so you can deliver on your purpose in the years to come.
Learn more about designing an architecture that helps you maximize your future success in the Leaders guide to digital infrastructure.
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