Turning Data Gravity Into Your Advantage

The explosive growth in data creation over the next three years will primarily occur outside the public cloud and significantly impact how enterprise leaders think about their infrastructure capacity.

This was one of the points made in the Digital Realty Data Gravity Index 2.0, which resulted from interviews with more than 7,000 technology experts across 23 countries and nine industries.

The data platform provider forecasts that global enterprise data creation will reach 1.2 million exabytes in the next three years, with 93% of this data created outside the public cloud.

Based on interviews with the IT leaders, the Index found that 76% of respondents utilized data to build new products and engage new customers. In comparison, 72% said they planned to add new locations to accommodate user expansion in the next two years.

Also, 78% modified their data management policies for compliance and business benefit, while 77% had specific connectivity needs to support their performance.

“Residency, sovereignty and localization of data are driving how enterprises place, connect and operate infrastructure to support their customers and communities in this data-driven economy,” the Index says.

“We need not only to create a data-first environment that promotes integration, security and collaboration, but also be increasingly aware of the geography around digital hubs and population centers.”

Unstoppable data growth

Digital Realty describes the phenomenon of “data gravity,” or how data becomes “an intense force, attracting more to it” as data is created, shared and exchanged across applications, users, systems, clouds and networks.

Data Gravity is influenced by key macro trends: digitally enabled interactions, data localization, mergers and acquisitions, cyber-physical integration and enterprise data stewardship.

For example, the Index forecasted that 70% of the new value created over the next 10 years would be based on digitally enabled platform models.

“The growth of private data centers requires a move towards an application-centric architecture”

With 63% of organizations preparing for an M&A deal in 2023, the number of data sources participating in data exchange significantly increases.

78% of IT leaders will maintain local copies of customer transaction data for compliance, while IoT implementations could enable up to USD12.6 trillion in value globally by 2030.

The enterprise is also rapidly becoming the world’s data steward, and by 2025 as much as 80% of worldwide data will reside in enterprises, increasing the volume of data that needs to be aggregated and stored.

As the data landscape expands and changes, physical locations are also crucial because financial centers—for example—are at the center of trade and now also centers for data creation, processing and exchange.

More storage servers will be required, and the Index says that 243 million incremental storage servers will be needed—split between public cloud and non-cloud storage—to accommodate enterprise data storage.

With 93% of new data sets to be created outside of the public cloud, with the Asia-Pacific leading the way, enterprise data processing is also set to occur outside of public clouds, creating the need for another 15.3 million servers in the next three years.

"Shifting from the classic approach of bringing a user to a system, the growth of private data centers requires a move towards an application-centric architecture," the Index says.

"Enterprises now need to bring everything to the data, which means they must now build a data-centric architecture that seizes this opportunity."

Adjacency

This growth implies that the storage servers need to be cloud adjacent, as the growth will occur between the cloud and the edge.

 “For cloud providers, a data-first strategy involves shifting traffic patterns from northbound to the cloud to southbound,” the Index says.

“Our suggestion to cloud providers is to calibrate their capacity plans across their availability zones, evolve cloud to cloud connectivity capabilities, and prioritize hybrid IT colocation offerings.”

Data Gravity is also an opportunity for network providers, which will need to introduce data-driven traffic management to facilitate data flows across the cloud, core and edge.

“Finally, for enterprises themselves, Data Gravity is also cloud-adjacent and requires both a shift into data-driven workflows and data-centric architecture,” the Index says.

“Calibrating capacity across employee centers, ensuring data and controls are cloud adjacent, and creating centers of data exchange all help enterprises capitalize on opportunities Data Gravity offers.”

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/ra2studio