VIDEO: The New Enterprise Deployment Trend and What it Means for Technology Infrastructure

In this 10-minute TED-style video, Tony Bishop (SVP of Platform, Growth and Marketing) explains what happened to enterprises once Data Gravity began to force them to re-think deployment strategies.

He also explains the cause and effect components of this data megatrend and what it means for all companies right now.

Find out more about how the data creation life cycle and the macro trends of Data Gravity are keys to understanding how to turn barriers into opportunities in a digital transformation climate.

Data Gravity can be addressed and solved.

Watch the video or read the transcript below.

You can also learn more about Data Gravity (including the inaugural report that measures the intensity and gravitational force of enterprise data growth) at the Data Gravity Insights Hub.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Tony Bishop, and on behalf of Digital Realty, want to wish each of you the very best during these challenging times. In the next 10 minutes, I’m going to share a personal story with you, introduce a new emerging megatrend, and discuss implications and suggested actions to address.

So, let's get started.

As a father of three boys, I'm very blessed. I get to experience daily life lessons besides a lot of chaos. One of those lessons that recently hit me was reflecting on my middle son Kane pictured on the screen.

Kane was born a premature baby (around five pounds) and could fit in my hand. Now, as you can see on the picture, he's an immovable object on the defensive line of his tackle football team. It's amazing how this gravitational force that he's become quickly transformed over the last 10 years.

I'm going to share with you a story of another type of gravitational force that is quickly and rapidly appearing and emerging. We call that Data Gravity, and I'm excited to share more with you today.

At Digital Realty, we are the largest provider of multi-tenant data center capacity in terms of operational square footage in the world. We sit with a unique vantage point. We are able to experience and see how the largest companies in the world build, deploy and operate their technology infrastructure on our platform. Recently, we witnessed a new emerging deployment type occurring - one that was being deployed by enterprises on large-scale purposes to address an emerging data trend.

Working with these customers, industry analysts and business partners, we dug into this to understand the cause and effect and the impact of what this meant to all people's technology infrastructure going forward. What we found was that the data creation life cycle of enterprises is being radically transformed as digital technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics, clouds and things permeate throughout their business processes globally.

So, let's unpack this a little further.

First, we found that data is being created in many different places by both people, employees and things. Gartner specifically has identified that by 2022, more than 50% of all enterprise data will be created outside of the traditional data center or even the cloud.¹

In terms of data processing, we found that these people and things are generating files and messages, which create interactions and transactions between other applications, people and systems.

And in our research, we found that when you segment the Forbes Global 2000 Enterprises, - so the largest, most profitable companies in the world, who are also the biggest spenders on information technology annually, would require 8,900 plus petaFLOPs of incremental computing to process new digital workflows that are supporting the data being created by employees and things globally in these top 21 metros.²

That's like adding quantum computers in every country that these enterprises do business in. In terms of data aggregation and exchange, that as data is being created and data's being processed, the data needs to be brought together, combined and stored…be enabled to exchange with others systems and other people.

Our research found that by 2024, again across the same global 2000 in the top 21 metros around the world, that will be the equivalent of they're going to need to add storage at a combined rate of 496 terabytes per second, per aggregation exchange.³ That would be like adding the US Library of Congress to every country, wherever they do business, so very substantial.

And then finally, one of the other things that we found working with these customers and studying this trend was that analytics and enrichment of data after it's been aggregated creates a compounding and continuous effect on the data creation life cycle. This is being driven by CIO agendas, as Gartner notes, where 65% of all CIOs are adding analytics/artificial intelligence-type capabilities to their core enterprise systems and services globally.⁴

This too will then create a compounding effect, which is why we want to introduce to you today the data creation life cycle and help you understand that when you look across an enterprise (in terms of how data's created, data's processed, aggregated and exchange, and then enriched to enable new intelligence and new digital workflows), it's going to create a significant transformational effect on all technology infrastructure of enterprises and those service providers who support them.

Furthermore, macro trends are amplifying this in terms of five key ones that we found in our research – specifically, enterprise data stewardship. The enterprise is fast becoming the world's data steward. IDC estimates that at least 80% of all the world's data will sit in some enterprised private deployment globally in the next few years.⁵

Additionally, mergers and acquisitions are continuing to amplify. This globalization unfolds across every enterprise model. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that pre-COVID levels will resume in the coming weeks and months, and this will drive again, an increase in data creation and integration life cycle requirements on all enterprises.⁶

Third, digitally enabled interactions. McKinsey recently studied surveying many CEOs globally on the importance of the shift to digital interactions as we move into this remote digital workplace-type world that's facing us today.⁷

Fourth, we found that data localization, whether driven by business policy, government policy, compliance or regulation by industry, is creating a gravitational effect where data must be maintained in specific countries and regions to maintain that compliance. This is compounding also.

And then finally, the emergence of both a cyber-physical type security paradigm, where operational technology, information technology, and physical worlds and digital worlds converge together.

What we found is all five of these individual macro trends are combining together to create a force multiplier that is going to make Data Gravity the most critical thing that all enterprises must face and deal with in the coming months and years.

So, to help, our firm has created and launched and provided an index, first of its kind for the market, to shape industry dialogue around it.

We feel it is necessary and important to help all enterprises and service providers understand the relevance of this problem and how to tackle it, because there's new exceptional value and opportunity - that if we can all come together and unlock it by focusing on the data gravitational forces of enterprise and infrastructure and where opportunities lie for those firms who can address it and solve it. You can find this report at digitalrealty.com/platform-digital/data-gravity-index, as noted on the bottom of the screen below.

And finally, I leave you with a few parting thoughts. As Sir Isaac Newton taught us about how tides are driven by gravitational force of the sun and the moon on the earth, Data Gravity will have the same kind of tides and ebbs and flows on business processes and how business and technology infrastructure needs to come together to solve this incredible emerging megatrend that can either be a problem, or in our case, what we feel is a blue ocean strategy that the industry as a whole to unlock new value and create new business impact and outcomes and make it a better world.

We hope you enjoyed this. We hope you download and read the report and wish you the very best with your business during these challenging times.

Thank you.

1 -Infrastructure is everywhere, Gartner, July 18, 2019
2- Digital Realty Market Intelligence & Analytics, September 2020
3- Digital Realty Market Intelligence & Analytics, September 2020
4- 400 Data and Analytics Predictions Through 2024, Gartner, March 20, 2020
5- The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core, IDC #US44413318, Data Age 2025, November 2018
6 - BRIEFINGS Newsletter, Goldman Sachs, June 16, 2020
7 - B2B Decision Maker Pulse Survey, McKinsey, April 2020