Digital transformation. Is it happening? Has it happened? Will it ever happen?

You may well be bored with the term, but it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future and likely to be around for a long time to come, not least because ‘digital’ means different things to different people.

For some, it’s about technology. For others it’s about a new way of engaging with customers. And for others still, it’s even bigger, representing an entirely new way of doing business.

Whatever the meaning, the challenge remains: it’s all about change. Being digital is an ever-evolving state of business activities, processes, competencies and models. Today, it is cloud, mobile, analytics and social media that are influencing the digital landscape.

However, for various reasons, businesses aren’t always quick to implement new technologies. Despite cloud being talked about for the last ten years or so, it still remains in the early stages of adoption.

Research conducted by Fujitsu found that aging technology is the major barrier to digital transformation, and 57% of the businesses surveyed admitted that existing technology is struggling to keep up with the demands of digitisation.

So how can organisations keep pace with the ever-increasing speed of doing business and ‘go digital’?

>See also: What does 2017 have in store for the data centre industry?

Sharing is caring

Businesses going through digital transformation across a variety of industries are amassing large quantities of data and evolving capabilities that need rich computing power, robust infrastructure and resilient connectivity, which is very expensive to achieve as a single organisation.

By sharing space and power and moving IT systems into a colocation facility, organisations can take advantage of the latest technologies without having to invest valuable capex or refreshes every couple of years. A colocation provider will typically have far greater resources to invest in security than an individual company.

With so much uncertainty around Brexit and the political changes across the globe, financial flexibility is a business priority. Buying colocation space leaves room to negotiate contracts, with terms that allow for flexible space, contract length and billing according to the amount of power consumed. These things all contribute to being able to develop a more predictable expenditure model.

Hybrid cloud

Cloud is at the heart of digital transformation, changing the way we work and live. More and more enterprises are now adopting a hybrid cloud model for their IT infrastructure and being able to easily reach cloud services is essential.

By choosing to colocate in a third-party data centre, organisations are in a shared environment with many businesses offering direct access to cloud platforms and applications. This creates an ecosystem where companies can benefit from leading edge services supplied by others in the same colocation space.

>See also: When big data and Brexit collide

Cloud solutions from providers like Google, Microsoft or AWS may be just a cross connect away within a premium data centre that provides a cloud connect solution. It is this ease of access to pubic cloud platforms that creates a very reliable environment of the latest technologies.

To support this hunger for compute power and access to digital solutions, most data centres have a good selection of carriers within their facilities who have provisioned extremely dense high quality fibre networks so customers have a wide choice of connections to cloud platforms and beyond.

These connections are often 100% reliable, as fail-safe options can be aligned to support any potential outages. For an organisation not choosing to outsource, this would be very costly and so they often work with one or two service providers, limiting their reliability and potentially increasing the risk should an issue arise.

Sourced from Darren Watkins, managing director, VIRTUS Data Centres