Datacentres are playing an increasingly important role as the infrastructure backbone of the digital economy, serving as central hubs for cloud computing, connectivity, and application deployment. They are vital infrastructure components that provide strong connectivity to captive, hosted, and cloud environments. Third-party data centres are becoming increasingly important in the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem, resembling hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs).
Both enterprises and hyperscale organisations recognise the significance of having continuously available and compliant infrastructure. Business leaders prioritize business resilience, with a specific emphasis on integrating business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) as essential aspects of their resilience strategies.
As more people in the Asia/Pacific (APAC) region are consuming a variety of digital services, from streaming to virtual banking, it has caused many enterprises in APAC to reconsider their digital infrastructure strategy.
Although most digital transformation (DX) efforts in the data centre industry were accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, this only laid the groundwork for what is yet to come, with the mainstream AI and ML adoption causing disruption at the core of computing.
Because of recent advancements, executives are compelled to reevaluate their strategies and find a balance in utilising hosting services. Organisations are increasingly demanding data centre services to secure high-quality, resilient, and secure infrastructure for their digital initiatives.
"Datacentres play a pivotal role in enabling businesses to harness the full potential of digital transformation beyond just providing space and power to house their critical IT infrastructures," says William Lee, research director for datacentres and telecommunications research, IDC Asia/Pacific. "As enterprises increasingly understand the need for cohesive integration between their core infrastructures to clouds and edge locations, they will expect data centre providers to help facilitate this connection," Lee adds.
Essential to innovation and growth
Jeremy Deutsch, the president at Equinix Asia-Pacific believes that digital infrastructure is essential for businesses to innovate, expand their markets and create a competitive edge regardless of their industry.
“Our customers in Asia-Pacific are able to accelerate their digital transformation journeys through our globally distributed platform with data centre and digital services that enable them to interconnect and deploy infrastructure at software speed,” he added.
“As the appetite for digital services and AI implementation continues to proliferate, Equinix will continue to expand its capacity in emerging markets across Southeast Asia, Australia, India, Japan and South Korea to help businesses enhance their operations and digital capabilities.”
Jeremy Deutsch
Drivers of change
The IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific Datacentre Operations and Management 2023 Vendor Assessment, has identified Digital Realty and Equinix as “Leaders” among Datacentre Operations and Management vendors, followed closely by "Major Players" in the market namely, GLP Group, KDDI, NTT, and STT GDC.
Daniel Pointon, group chief technology officer of STTelemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), opines that the new reality of business is that reliable connectivity and digital infrastructure are critical in enabling businesses to move faster and be more agile.
“We see a few factors driving the macro fundamentals for digital infrastructure demand: The rapid rise in digitisation of business and commerce across Southeast Asia and globally; the ongoing global explosion in data creation that continues to drive demand for data centres worldwide; and the rise in adoption of AI and machine learning.”
Daniel Pointon
“In today’s AI gold rush, data centres will be the equivalent of modern-day shovels. As such, businesses and enterprises will need reliable and scalable access to this purpose-built digital infrastructure to capture growth and more effectively compete in a challenging global economy,” he continued.
Making the right choice for you
Serene Nah, managing director and head of Asia Pacific at Digital Realty, says enterprises need to consider their overall digital infrastructure strategy carefully when choosing a data centre provider. “We recommend a holistic approach for a balanced, future-ready technology strategy that considers both infrastructure and operational solutions that can help companies solve complex hybrid IT challenges,” she continued.
She advocates assessing comprehensive support for diverse business demands—from routine operations to cutting-edge deployments—is crucial.
“Beyond foundational considerations like reliability, security, scalability, flexibility, and robust connectivity, a platform approach allows flexible control and consumption of digital infrastructure assets at scale.”
Serene Nah
“This streamlines technology adoption, enabling a focused pursuit of core business objectives in a rapidly changing digital environment,” she continued.
