Connectivity is crucial in the digital age. Across every sector, business success now rests on forging more effective links between people, processes and information to unleash fresh ideas, insights and innovation. By harnessing the power of connectivity, organisations can embrace unprecedented opportunities for growth and value creation, worth around £30 billion a year to the UK economy alone.
As a nexus for all the connectivity, processing and storage supporting today’s businesses, the data centre lies at the heart of any successful digital strategy. However, not all data centres are created equal when it comes to connectivity options: both the location and nature of a facility are crucial considerations that affect performance, flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
It’s critical to get things right when deciding how and where to host your IT assets; you need to harness the right infrastructure, in the right place, to meet increasingly dynamic customer requirements, drive value and deliver exceptional end-user experiences. As a global hub for telecoms companies, cloud providers and international fibre optic links, central London offers the densest and most diverse connectivity in the UK. Alongside London’s critical mass of consumers and corporations, its wide range of network providers has made the heart of the capital a data centre hotspot. More than three quarters (77%) of IT leaders now say London is a critical data centre location, with a presence in the City of London desired most.
Carrier-neutral data centres inside major cities are typically the best connected, offering dozens of choices. In contrast, the connectivity options available from facilities outside urban centres usually number in single digits. Since these colocation facilities are also entirely independent, customers aren’t locked in to any single network provider. Instead, they have the agility to pick and choose the connectivity options that best suit their business needs – whether their decisions are based on cost, service performance, resilience, or a host of other factors.
With a multitude of big-name networks, cloud platforms and service providers sharing the same facility, connectivity-hungry colocation customers can also make informed investments in private interconnections that maximise performance, reach and cost-efficiency - giving them an edge over competitors when it comes to both growth and innovation. With your carrier of choice just a cross-connect away, it’s possible to avoid the need to establish costly metro or national tail circuits and slash connectivity costs by around 25%. Additionally, access to a wide range of connectivity providers with diverse physical infrastructure can help any digital business avoid unnecessary downtime – something that currently costs UK organisations more than £12 billion a year.
Any colocation provider you’re considering should have highly responsive, automated processes that make setting-up these cross-connects fast and simple; look for those who can do it in three days or less. Additionally, seek out providers that can build and manage private links to the leading public cloud platforms to allow your business to capitalise on the flexibility and cost-savings of the public cloud, without compromising on performance, reliability and security.
As digital transformation continues to redefine what’s possible, central London is the best place to harness the high-performance connectivity that drives business success. Uniquely situated between the Square Mile and Tech City, Interxion’s London Data Centre Campus offers access to more than 90 connectivity providers, giving you the choice and flexibility your business needs. A £30m expansion is also underway that will add 1,800m2 of data centre space to help even more businesses capitalise on the capital.
Click here to see how Interxion’s growing London Data Centre Campus can help you forge the right connections for business success
