Even before the international COVID-19 pandemic, research showed that in 2018, nearly two-thirds of global professionals were already working remotely at least one day a week. Driven in part by growing employee demands for flexible working hours and aided by widespread adoption of robust, reliable home broadband connections, the past decade has made it clear that working remotely isn’t just a growing trend – it’s the future of work, and the future is now.
This growing popularity of working remotely brings significant changes to the tools we use and the ways we communicate and collaborate, as it requires digital channels, technology and connectivity more than ever before. But as businesses increasingly transition toward remote working models, the IT environments that keep them running are facing unprecedented pressure. As a result, organisations must ensure that business continuity remains top of mind.
Employees working from home need the ability to continue collaborating amongst themselves and delivering on performance as expected, as this leads to continued innovation for their customers – who are also relying on digital resources more than ever. But the reality is that most businesses’ existing infrastructure isn’t built to keep up with these increased demands for connectivity, low latency, direct cloud access and more.
Businesses need an infrastructure that’s powerful and reliable enough to deliver the services and experiences that their customers expect. Managing this kind of infrastructure in a proprietary facility isn’t sustainable, since most companies with on-prem data centres don’t have the resources or expertise to do so effectively.
So, what does it take to enable the reliable, high-performance connectivity businesses need to keep core business operations running smoothly? Direct access to a connected community in order to keep things moving at a rapid pace. As the backbone of our current digital society, colocated data centres interconnect businesses with their partners, suppliers and customers, while also providing the flexibility and scalability for businesses to handle future growth.
In addition to overall cost-savings on IT infrastructure and improved network security, colocation gives businesses the connectivity, resiliency, low-latency and security necessary to ensure that employees can still achieve the optimal performance and productivity needed to continue business momentum and deliver excellent experiences to their customers in-turn. Whether employees are commuting to the office or telecommuting, data centres enable businesses to meet their customers’ increased digital demands.
“Enterprises have three pillars to any initiative they undertake: improve customer service; reduce costs; mitigate risks. Remote working factors into all three of these pillars and has become a de facto standard in the enterprise world. For enterprises that are behind the curve, they will struggle in the current environment and indeed potentially lose customers. The robustness of a proper online strategy for customers and employees alike is imperative today and in the future”
William Fenick, VP Enterprise, Interxion.
“During the Coovid-19 pandemic, we have seen an increase in demand for multiple services, from video conferencing to video on demand/OTT to gaming. This has created more traffic throughout the day rather than the normal peaks and troughs one would see. As a data centre provider, our responsibility is to be a flexible, responsive and agile partner to enable our clients to scale to meet this demand, from cross-connect provisioning to additional capacity to providing the remote hands and eyes services that clients need in these challenging times”
Bryan Hill, Director Platforms, Interxion.
“Colocation facilities, and specifically carrier-neutral ones, provide enterprises with the choice of multiple network operators, ensuring traffic from critical applications can be distributed across diverse network infrastructures. This means that a network failure of one operator doesn’t impact on the end-user experience”
Mike Hollands, Director Market Development & Strategy, Interxion.
“As enterprises have been migrating critical workloads into the clouds, they were already dealing with the growing connectivity demands of what has essentially become an increasingly distributed infrastructure. Now, with a workforce that is accessing services remotely, the rapidly evolving culture of professionals collaborating from home through video streaming services as well as the seismic shift of consumers needing to access services digitally have exposed the gaps in any underlying infrastructure. For many enterprises this opens a path to accelerate digitisation efforts and to fundamentally re-architect their infrastructure to deal with the current challenges and to prepare for the future.
Colocation data centres provide the ideal platform to base the network on, as they are offering direct access to hyper scalers, Internet Exchanges, carriers, ISVs and Service Providers. The collective strength of these connected communities provides all the ingredients that enterprises would not be able to build single-handedly and truly help them to tackle their challenges and future proof their Infrastructures”
Jan-Pieter Nentwig, Director of Strategy Marketing, Enterprise Direct, Interxion.
To learn more about how colocating with Interxion can enable business continuity, click here.