As Richard Branson once said, “succeeding in business is all about making connections”. In the 21st Century, those connections aren’t just of the human variety: business innovation, growth and competitiveness increasingly depend on exploiting the skyrocketing links between people, processes, things and data.
We’re in the midst of a sweeping digital transformation that will usher in even greater change than the first Industrial Revolution. The future belongs to companies ready to experiment with new business models and harness original thinking across their organisation to solve challenges, amaze customers and boost revenues.
Capitalise on success
London is the ideal location for any business that wants to capitalise on the coming data explosion, which will see the IP traffic running across global networks triple by 2020. Boasting a robust communications infrastructure alongside a dense population, the heart of the capital has become a hotbed of new ideas and technologies.
Central London is now home to almost 40,000 tech businesses, a fifth of all those in the entire country, as well as three-quarters of the global Fortune 500. Backed by two Internet Exchanges, 500 broadband providers and unrivalled transatlantic and Pan-European data links, the capital has the connectivity backbone needed to support light-speed digital innovation.
Meanwhile, paradigm shifting advances like the Internet of Things, 5G mobile and intelligent automation are already becoming a reality in central London. In the last year alone, we’ve heard about Volvo’s rollout of 100 driverless vehicles, EE’s 450Mbps mobile connectivity tests, and Starship Technologies’ fleet of autonomous delivery droids. Businesses in the Square Mile can drive differentiation and market advantage from these emerging innovations - harnessing new opportunities and stealing a march on competitors.
Yet, to benefit from all this skyrocketing innovation, companies need the right infrastructure in the right location.
Don’t wait, colocate
At the heart of any successful IT strategy lies the data centre. As the nexus for connectivity, processing and storage, these facilities are critical to supporting a world driven by big data analytics, where everything is delivered as-a-service or on demand, and ensuring seamless connections between businesses, customers, devices and sensors.
With a data centre in central London rather than on the outskirts, companies can ensure their most critical infrastructure is just a stone’s throw from the capital’s 7.5 million broadband subscribers and 976,000 businesses. This proximity not only empowers higher performance content and services that keep customers coming back, it also allows for rapid responsiveness to market demand. In a world where real-time services are fast becoming the norm, IT infrastructure in close proximity to end users means companies can process, interpret and feed-back information to end users in split seconds.
Nonetheless, deploying an in-house server or data centre can be a costly proposition given central London’s sky-high real estate prices. Fortunately, colocation offers a way for companies to meet stringent performance, reliability and security demands, while controlling costs. That’s why the capital is now a colocation hotspot, boasting 77 carrier-neutral facilities and a demand for capacity that outstrips any other European city.
Carrier and cloud-neutral colocation facilities are entirely independent. Hosted infrastructure isn’t locked in to any network, hardware or software vendor, giving customers access to the widest possible range of connectivity providers and IT services. This means they can select the right connectivity for their business, using multiple carriers to build in redundancy, ensure resilience and reduce costs. Once again, central London also offers greater opportunities here: typical carrier neutral facilities in the City have up to 300 networks present on site, while those outside London usually offer connectivity to less than ten.
Additionally, the independent nature of carrier neutral colocation means these facilities offer a ready-formed gathering of potential suppliers, partners and customers. With all these companies just a single cross-connect away, companies can invest in private interconnections that maximise performance, reach and cost-effectiveness. Some colocation providers can even build and manage private links to the leading public cloud platforms, allowing businesses to capitalise on the flexibility and cost-savings of the public cloud, without compromising on performance, reliability and security.
London’s calling
Today, Interxion offers London’s only centrally located data centre campus. For over 18 years we’ve been where London’s digital community connects: our state-of-the-art carrier and cloud neutral facility provides highly secure, scalable infrastructure, linking customers to the partners, suppliers, networks and cloud platforms they rely on.
Our data centres are also home to a wide range of IT service providers, offering public and private cloud platforms, systems integration, managed hosting, software-as-a-service, data and information for specific industries, and IT security, business continuity and consultancy services.
It’s time to get connected. With IT infrastructure in the heart of London, companies won’t just be able to meet the requirements of today, they’ll be ready to capitalise on the full potential of tomorrow and stay ahead in the race for business success.
Discover all the benefits of being connected at the heart of the capital in our free whitepaper.
