Information overload - How data centres are helping businesses and economies weather the Covid-19 storm

Authors - Mohamad Abou-Zaki,CEO,Emircom , Ajayya Kumar,CFO/COO, Emircom and Frelix Ummer, Regional Manager - IOT & Datacenter at Emircom

The information superhighway just got busier. Ever since the outbreak of the pandemic, there has been a surge in online traffic. A recent article in Forbes reports a 70% increase in internet usage across the world. In such circumstances data centres - the backbone and repository of content and data - face a number of challenges. 

Let’s take a look. 

• Request for increased bandwidth: Cloud service providers and data centre operators are being requested by their clients to increase their bandwidth in ways not previously anticipated, and hence experience network infrastructure limitations. 
• Increase in remote connections: Organizations with on-premise data centres are struggling to keep up with the shift to a remote working model and might find it difficult to keep business running with higher counts of remote connections.
• Burst in data centres usage: As demand for online services skyrockets, the network architecture of many on-prem data centres make them unable to cope with the level of traffic demanded by them during the Covid-19 situation, leading to business continuity issues. 
•  Surge in online streaming: As a record number of customers started streaming content at the same time, major online video streaming companies like Netflix and YouTube had to cut the picture quality and reduce the video bitrate in some parts of the world to avoid adding to the strain on the internet.
• Scaling of data centres: IT departments of all sizes were forced to quickly adapt and make sudden and unplanned changes to the data centres in support of business continuity. This has occasionally caused bottleneck.
• Educational system caught unaware: Educational institutions did not have the IT infrastructure to offer digital services such as virtual classrooms, online meetings, video collaborations, distance learning or different business intelligence applications. They are now looking at an accelerated path to digitization and productivity.

Heavy load on e-commerce platforms: A number of e-commerce companies faced delays, crashes and failures due to the sudden spike in demand. Even those organizations that had a stable platform, were affected due to limitations in their data centre infrastructure, bandwidth and traffic management.

• Inadequate IT infrastructure in the healthcare sector: As hospitals strived to deal with the crisis, their data centres struggled as they were neither equipped to cope with  the  increase in traffic, nor with the rising demand for telemedicine, tele-health and teleconsultation facilities for patients who could not visit hospitals.

Covid-19 has put immense strain on all systems and all data centres. 

In order to face the “new normal” with ever-increasing persisting demands in various market segments, data centres will need to evolve: 

• More global data centres: Higher data traffic and bandwidth requirements will fast-track the need for more data centres globally.
• Regional focus: Growth in data content storage and caching requirement from over the top (OTT) media service providers like Netflix and YouTube will result in more localised and distributed data centres in order to guarantee higher streaming quality.
• Going local: To address IT security concerns, governmental bodies are expected to introduce new laws and policies on storage and retention of data within geographical boundaries. This could result in the establishment of nearshore data centres off the coast of certain countries.
• On to the Clouds: Organizations will be reallocating their IT Infrastructure and on-prem data centre investments and move towards co-location, hosting, or cloud Infrastructure. In addition to major cost benefits, this will ensure flexibility in scaling up/out the IT Infrastructure as and when required and provide higher last-mile bandwidth.
• More robust e-commerce platforms: There has been an exponential growth in online shopping. Due to the challenges that online retailers have faced during the current situation with their on-premise data centres, they will be migrating to hosting or cloud-based setups, which will result in the increased dominance of global data centre players.
•  Supporting the front-liners: Hospitals and healthcare centres will further introduce telemedicine services to continue to attend to patients in need. This will completely change the IT requirements and will expose the need to build robust data centre infrastructures.

The future is now: Across the globe, digital transformation initiatives that were expected to take years to deploy have been implemented in a matter of days and weeks. This rush to digitization will further fuel the growth around edge and data centres that are more efficient, are capable of hyperscale designs and can support the most complex workloads.

Through its in-depth expertise in building and operating data centres of different sizes, Emircom can play a key role in supporting the new market’s needs. Emircom is experienced in delivering custom-built data centres and can offer a wide choice of models such as Enterprise, co-location, Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) or Build-Lease-Transfer (BLT) data centres.