Standing at the Edge

Unless we were born this morning, we will all have seen, to some extent, the continuous evolution of the world of IT – constantly adapting to meet the changing needs of the marketplace and to embrace the latest innovations. Just looking at the basic infrastructure, we have seen the processing centre develop from an old and noisy dedicated data room humming with enormous machines that could just about spit out a sales report, to desktop landbound computers that could talk only to another machine in the same building, to networked data centres and fully connected businesses, onward to Cloud, then Fog, and now Edge. It is clear that what is fit for purpose today may not address all the demands of tomorrow.  

Whilst the Cloud with its myriad of benefits is here to stay for at least the foreseeable future, the burgeoning of the Internet of Things (over 23 billion devices in 2018!) increasingly demanded that intelligence and processing become more local, embracing first the use of Fog computing and local area networks. And as more and more 'things' become connected, the amount of data that now has to be processed increases exponentially with accompanying risk and bandwidth issues. Take autonomous vehicles, for instance. A single test vehicle can generate petabytes of data annually and this massive amount of data demands an entirely new computing architecture and infrastructure. Enter Edge Computing, designed to perform computations closer to the data source, addressing issues of potential contagion and loss. 

Gathering clouds

Data centres first boomed in the late 1990s, evolving from the data rooms of the past as business sought fast internet connectivity and non-stop operation to remain competitive – and as these vital facilities became ever more complex and costly to build and maintain, companies turned to colocation data centres in order to benefit from third party investment. When the Cloud showed first signs of real growth, some thought that the world of data centres was coming to an end – but that was far from the truth. Few businesses can entrust all their applications and data to the Cloud, and connected secure data centres such as Datum proved to be a vital component of hybrid solutions.

Along with the rest of IT, the world of data centres has also evolved, offering businesses everything from a single rack to a full data centre to house their infrastructure.

The changing world of Datum

When Datum opened its doors in 2013, clients mostly sought our highly secure facilities to protect the bulk of their critical infrastructure. Very swiftly, clients then looked for resilient connections to the cloud for the increasingly popular hybrid solutions that their businesses required, connections which Datum had in abundance. In more recent times, Datum developed its two-phase approach for digital transformation programmes, providing a proven platform to help clients maximise the value from their IT streams. 

And in 2019, Datum is again acknowledging the changing patterns by offering the power of Datum Edge Pods to organisations looking for distributed computing solutions from our highly secure cloud and carrier-rich facility. These pods offer all the advantages of Datum’s highly engineered data centre from a much smaller footprint and the multiple connectivity options can ensure that the pod is fully integrated with the overall infrastructure. 

What next?

I have no idea, but I am fascinated to see, and I am certain that Datum will be pushing forward to support whatever our clients may need. Get in touch to find out more.