Digital transformation - is it on your agenda?

Posted on in

The need for digital transformation

Corporate IT departments have been aware of the importance of digital transformation for over a decade now, but with changes like burgeoning AI and the rise in importance of sustainability, the context keeps shifting, which is making the process ever harder.

Most organisations are still somewhere on the transformation path – some at the early stage of untangling legacy estates, others further along and now wrestling with how to optimise what they have built. The question is no longer whether to modernise, but whether the approach you started with still fits what the business needs today.

The key role played by data centres

The data centre is still where a lot of these decisions land. For some, that means running existing owned facilities but for others, it means admitting that running your own large-scale computing environment is an expensive, CAPEX-heavy commitment that ties up money and management attention better spent elsewhere.

Colocation has an important role to play here because renting rack space from a specialist provider offers room to grow without building. It shifts power, cooling and physical security to someone whose business is exactly that. And it gives you the flexibility to scale up or contract down without writing off sunk costs.

What a modern infrastructure strategy looks like

The organisations getting this right tend to think in terms of workload placement, not just location. Some applications still need the low latency or control of on premise hardware whilst others belong in public or private cloud. The point is knowing which is which and structuring your environment so you can move workloads when the business case shifts without embarking on another huge migration project.

Colocation can sit at the centre of that model – a provider with direct cloud on-ramps, multiple carrier options and modern power usage efficiency can act as the physical hub for a hybrid architecture rather than a simple outsourcing destination.

What still holds people back

We have worked with colocation clients for well over a decade now and have found that the single biggest barrier at the start is rarely technical – it is trust. Can an outside provider actually protect business-critical infrastructure? Will they be there when something goes wrong? What happens during the transition?

The organisations that get beyond this trust hurdle fastest tend to do three things:

  1. They ask prospective providers detailed, scenario-based questions about support and escalation.
  2. They get underneath the experience of potential providers to establish whether they are going to be able to offer the support they may need further down the line.
  3. They structure the initial move, so it is well-planned and the individual stages are easily reversible if things go at all awry.

What clients actually need

Over the years, the same requirements come up repeatedly – not because they are generic, but because they genuinely matter:

  • The ability to flex power, space and footprint up and down over the life of a contract.
  • Short-term access to extra capacity for specific projects or seasonal demand.
  • A credible environmental efficiency story – not just PUE figures, but transparent reporting on steps that are being taken to mitigate environmental impact.
  • Direct access to multiple cloud platforms and network carriers without being locked into one.
  • Clear, documented support processes during migration.
Talk to us

A practical route through

Our digital transformation pathway is deliberately split into two phases. The first phase (consolidation) is about clarity – getting your existing estate into one place, understanding how it actually fits together, and mapping the dependencies. You cannot transform sensibly until you know what you have.

Phase one of Datum's digital transformation pathway.

The second phase (transformation) is about design: deciding where specific workloads should sit, harnessing the benefit of flexible contracts to release capacity you do not need (or add further capacity you hadn’t anticipated), and building in the operational margin to adapt as requirements change.

Phase two of Datum's digital transformation pathway.

Where to start

The businesses that stay competitive are generally not the ones who have transformed once, but the ones built on infrastructure they can keep transforming. If you want to talk through what that might look like for your estate – what a realistic consolidation and migration path involves, what support you should expect from a colocation partner, and how to structure the first phase – we’d love to hear from you.

Back to Insights