5 Ways to Future Proof Your Business with High Performance Data Centers

Most business leaders know they need the right digital infrastructure in the right locations. But they can't plan just for today; they need to prepare for whatever the future might hold. This isn't easy to do, because they don't know what the future will hold. They have to be ready for anything, and they need data centers that can help them do that.

Legacy on-premises data centers don't provide the flexibility needed to future-proof a digital business. Upgrading these data centers is expensive and time-consuming. By the time you complete one upgrade, your needs will have changed again, and you'll have to start planning the next upgrade immediately.

Colocation services offer flexibility that's missing from private data centers. High-performance colocation data centers provide more than just space and power; they also offer ecosystem access, geographic reach and advanced digital services to help businesses overcome many of their biggest challenges.

In the future, high-performance data centers will become even more important. They'll help businesses prepare for requirements they don't even know they have yet. Let's take a closer look at what those requirements might look like.

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1. Meeting the needs of future AI workloads

AI-ready digital infrastructure isn't just about getting the right hardware; you also need to back up that hardware with scalable energy, advanced cooling capabilities and an ecosystem of service providers and partners. It's hard enough getting all this today, and it's unlikely to get easier in the future.

We can safely assume that AI datasets will continue to grow, which means that businesses will need more compute capacity, energy and cooling. Meeting these needs will take consistent investments in new infrastructure. It's not something business leaders can do themselves, unless they want data center management to become their full-time job.

AI infrastructure requirements are becoming more complex thanks to emerging regulations like the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. To comply with these regulations, enterprises will need complete control and visibility over their AI workloads and models. In short, they'll need a high-performance data center to store their AI assets. This will give them a private environment that they maintain control over, along with the flexibility to move assets to the cloud as needed.

2. Preparing for future sustainability requirements

Achieving AI adoption and meeting sustainability goals are both things that no business can do working alone. Just as success with AI depends on finding the right partners, success with sustainability depends on finding partners that prioritize sustainability the same way you do.

For instance, supporting future workloads in a more sustainable way is going to require constant innovation. Colocation providers can do the hard work of innovating for sustainability in ways that enterprises cannot. Enterprises can reap the benefits of that hard work just by deploying as a customer in a high-performance data center.

The innovations required for long-term sustainability come in two forms:

• Efficiency innovations that allow data centers to reduce unnecessary energy consumption
• Energy innovations that help replenish local grids from renewable sources

On the second point, Equinix has invested in power purchase agreements (PPAs) to support wind and solar projects worldwide. These PPAs represent more than 1 gigawatt of energy under long-term contract. Once fully built out, the projects underlying those PPAs are expected to have a combined generation capacity of 3 million MWh per year.

3. Accessing the right clouds, quickly and easily

To meet their future cloud needs, enterprises should work with a digital infrastructure partner that prioritizes vendor neutrality. At Equinix, neutrality has been an integral part of our DNA since our founding more than 25 years ago. Today, we're the market leader in low-latency cloud on-ramps, making it easier for our customers to connect with multiple cloud providers in multiple locations.

Equinix also offers innovative multicloud networking solutions to help move data to different clouds quickly and securely. For instance, we announced Equinix Fabric® Cloud Router earlier this year to help simplify routing between clouds and across hybrid cloud environments.

We recognize that our customers need to account for multicloud adoption as they rearchitect their networks, which is why we'll continue to invest in new tools that further simplify the user experience around multicloud networking. This is yet another example of a valuable capability only found in a high-performance data center.

4. Enabling global expansion

The business world is becoming a smaller place. In the future, you'll likely want to expand into markets that aren't even on your radar today. Building traditional private data centers in each of these markets would be impractical. It wouldn't allow you to quickly scale up capacity in new locations, and it could also lead you to overprovision resources in markets that later become less important to your business.

Fortunately, when you deploy in a high-performance data center, you don't just get a single data center, but an interconnected global platform of data centers in many strategic locations. You can deploy in new places as needed and easily connect back to your existing infrastructure in core markets.

Equinix IBX® colocation data centers are available in 70+ metros on six continents. We've never stopped investing in new markets because we recognize that new opportunities are always arising in different places, and we want to help our customers capitalize on those opportunities. It's this commitment that led us to pursue expansions in developing markets like the Philippines, where we recently announced the acquisition of three data centers, and South Africa, where our new data center in Johannesburg opened its doors last month.

5. Pursuing digital transformation

We've been hearing about the importance of digital transformation for years now. This focus will continue going into the future, but we may have to adjust our understanding of what the term really means. We can't think of going from traditional business to digital business as a one-time thing. Instead, it will be an iterative process, where you're always looking to adjust your digital capabilities to keep up with an ever-changing business landscape.

Digital transformation is about injecting digital capabilities into every aspect of your operations. This means improving the user experience not just for your customers, but for your employees as well. To do this, you'll need distributed infrastructure to ensure low-latency connectivity to your end users at the digital edge, wherever that edge may be in your case.

Deploying in a high-performance data center can help you treat digital transformation as the continuous improvement project that it needs to be. Once again, you'll be able to take advantage of the investments that the data center provider makes on your behalf, instead of having to plan and fund data center improvements for yourself.

Learn more and get started

Every day, Equinix customers are learning what they can achieve without on-premises data centers slowing them down. With the help of high-performance data centers from Equinix, they're lowering latency, increasing cost-efficiency and future-proofing their operations. Visit us today to learn how you could do the same.