Colocation and Interconnection Trends: How the Edge will Play a Central Role as We Move Forward
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In episode six, Gary Lamora, Regional Director, Schneider Electric and Amber Caramella, Chief Revenue Officer, Netrality Data Centers look ahead to what’s trending in the colocation and interconnection industries for the remainder of 2020 — with a particular focus on the central role edge will play.
It’s no surprise that edge growth is being driven by 5G, IoT, AI and machine learning, according to Amber who is also seeing acceleration in digital transformation roadmaps. “This fast track is to adapt to the new digital norm brought on by COVID-19 and the increased velocity of applications that require high speed, low latency and greater reliability,” she says.
Gary and Amber agree that enterprises are relying more on edge computing, and, thereby, colocation and interconnection, to realize the full potential of their application services. When edge is mentioned, the inevitable question follows: What’s the definition? Beyond the standard “get closer to the end user,” Amber characterizes edge as multilayered — both infrastructure and devices — computing that can take place anywhere.
Modernizing with the Edge
“As enterprises alter their go-to-market strategies to innovate and grow revenue outside of traditional growth models, the edge will play a role,” says Amber. “At the same time, edge will help modernize traditional data centers.”
To create new product offerings and differentiate, enterprises across all sectors are expanding out of core markets to secondary and tertiary markets. Amber cites healthcare as a top example during this time with the upsurge in telehealth and mobile labs.
“These environments require access to data to make fast decisions. I’m also seeing similar trends across the automotive, logistics and financial verticals that are also leveraging, smaller markets for edge deployments,” she says.
Gary adds, “We’re definitely seeing similar growth with cloud service providers. One of our CDN customers saw more than a 30% spike in traffic April. This type of demand calls for flexible architecture deployments.”
Listen to the Podcast for More Insights
Gary and Amber dig into the different types of edge approaches and strategies that will support our increasingly digital world going forward — where centralized and distributed, hybrid cloud and data centers all coexist. Listen to the Data Center Tech Bytes podcast now.
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