InterXion : The data centre’s big role in harnessing...

Big data is now truly a big industry and the onus is firmly on enterprises to embrace technologies that help them not only understand their data but use it to gain a competitive advantage.

The data boom

The amount of data in existence will have reached roughly 44 zettabytes - that's 44 trillion gigabytes - by 2020, a ten-fold increase since 2015.

This boom in data is partly being fuelled by an astonishing increase in online activity. For example, around 66,000 search queries are now performed on Google every second - that's nearly 3.5 trillion every year - while WhatsApp users send more than 29 million messages every minute and almost 5 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every day.

The rise of the Internet of Things is also encouraging the rapid increase in data creation, with Gartner predicting 20.4 billion connected devices to be in circulation by 2020.

The big role of the data centre

These numbers represent a major opportunity for enterprises, but one that can only be realised if they can understand and take advantage of data in real-time. However, the vast majority remain unable to make sense of most of their data, leaving it stagnant in their systems and subject to the principle of diminishing data value.

To capitalise on the big data opportunity, enterprises must have access to the most powerful cloud analytics and business intelligence tools. These applications allow time-sensitive data to be collected, parsed and transformed into business-ready insights.

In order to get maximum value out of the investment involved in big data tools, businesses must consider not only what applications they're using but how they're being accessed. This requires having the basics in place, which begins with providing a safe home for your data to be managed and processed, and premium cloud access capabilities that ensure fast, secure access to cloud applications and services.

Colocation data centres sit at the epicentre of this, providing the reliability and security that are critical to data-intensive enterprises. Storing your data within a dedicated data centre provides the necessary infrastructure required to handle ever-heavier data demands and complex workloads. The level of redundancy provided by colocation also ensures that the risk of downtime, disruption and data loss, which can all have dire consequences for any enterprise's reputation and finances, is massively diminished.

Not only does colocation provide a premium solution for managing big data, it also offers the substantial benefits of connectivity and cloud access. Connecting to cloud platforms via dedicated infrastructure provides the processing speeds necessary for big data tasks, combined with the scalability, agility and flexibility that meets your business's increasing data needs.

Business benefits of big data

The true potential of your data is not in the data itself, but in your ability to deploy it and create tangible business outcomes. Colocating at Interxion's latest data centre LON3, in the heart of East London, will offer the range of connectivity options your business needs to link seamlessly with the customers, partners, suppliers, networks and cloud platforms you rely on. It offers the low-latency, reliability and outstanding application performance that you require to excel in today's hyper-connected, data-intensive world.

Interxion's London Campus is a thriving community of every kind of digital service and innovative tech company. This community is forging new alliances and business collaborations fuelled by the same industry-leading connectivity options and cloud platforms, and directly connected to LINX, the UK's largest internet exchange.

Want to find out how Interxion can help you harness your big data? More information about the business benefits of housing your data in a location like LON3 is availablehere.