By Adam Gardner, Head of Products, NEXTDC
The debilitating impact of latency is often largely underestimated when it comes to building an optimised digital platform that enables an organisation to connect, transform and prosper.
Previously I wrote about how even the smallest of improvements in latency can compound across complex architectures to create business value. Today I’m diving a little deeper and will elaborate on why your connectivity strategy will become ever more critical to your business as your data volumes grow.
What matters most to you?
When we look at the impact of internet latency through a microscopic lens, it’s abundantly clear that real and significant benefits can be derived through architecture that fosters low latency, meaning you can ensure there is a consistent, repeatable architecture.
With the improvements we explored in last week’s example, we found an extra 40 minutes a week that you could spend focusing on innovation or creating productivity enhancements driving increased employee engagement. Perhaps you want to drive better performance from your technology, giving your customers the best possible digital experience? Or perhaps you could simply use that extra time each day practising mindfulness and sharpening your focus?
So far, all we’ve talked about is reducing latency and the benefits that brings. Yet, reducing network latency often has another significant and more directly attributable benefit – lower operating costs. According to Cisco, over the past five years, the amount of global IP traffic increased by a rate of 22%. Cisco also forecasts that by the end of 2020 Global IP traffic will reach an annual run rate of 2.3 Zettabytes, and by 2022 global IP traffic will reach a staggering 4.8 Zettabytes. It’s evident that there are no signs of this slowing down.
If the last 10 years are anything to go by, complexity is growing and so are the operating costs of running your infrastructure platform. This reinforces just how important it is to get infrastructure architecture right, so it’s built to support your operational and financial requirements for the years to come.
By bringing your platform closer to the ecosystem it resides within, while securely and directly connecting to this ecosystem, you significantly reduce latency. In turn improving performance, whilst continuing to reduce the cost of running your organisation. In today’s hybrid cloud environments, organisations are regularly interacting and transacting with hyperscale cloud providers, local cloud providers and as-a-Service partners, carriers and of course, customers.
In today’s world, efficiency and customer satisfaction are critical to success. Everything you can do to deliver and optimise these two elements to your organisation will pay dividends.
The role of colocation in hybrid architectures
The value of colocation data centres with regards to power efficiency, high density compute capability and physical security is well documented and largely understood. So too is the ability to move your operating model away from large unpredictable capital expenditure, to more stable and predictable operating expenses.
What may not be so well understood is the role that connectivity plays in the wider context, and arguably this piece of the puzzle is just as critical as the underlying infrastructure element. Undoubtedly there is lot more yet to explore, outside of this short read.
For me personally, I’m proud to be part of an organisation who is helping build the infrastructure platform for the digital economy. We’ve built Australia’s largest footprint of cloud-connected and cloud-enabled data centres. As the home of Where the Cloud Lives, we house and offer direct connections to all the major global public cloud platforms. Importantly, with over 750 partners, we not only support the world’s largest cloud providers, our ecosystem comprises hundreds of local MSP’s, aaS providers and carriers that ultimately underpin hybrid environments.
Through these cloud and local ICT partners, we provide the critical connectivity for your applications which helps shave off the milliseconds I mentioned earlier, whilst reducing your costs and improving application and network performance.
NEXTDC’s connectivity solutions mean that regardless of which of our nine data centres across the country you are colocated in, you are only ever one connection away from every interconnected component that form your hybrid/multi-cloud architecture.
Backed by a 100% uptime guarantee for our critical infrastructure, we offer flexibility, diversity, bullet-proof redundancy and greater resilience around how you deploy, scale and manage your digital platform - a level of choice and peace of mind that no other data centre provider in Australia can offer you, when it comes to ensuring the long term success of your hybrid strategy.
Reach out to NEXTDC if you want to know more about gaining the freedom to lower your costs, improve performance, and successfully execute your transformation strategy.