User Manual
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation
6
DCD Comment
The ongoing digital transformation of economies globally should
represent a major opportunity for multi-tenant data centers across
both the enterprise and shared data center sectors. The data
center is the cornerstone of digital transformation processes since
at least in a post-legacy configuration it oers the processing,
storage and network capacity to enable those processes to occur.
Colocation providers have historically oered enterprise a higher
spec’d and more cost-eective data center option than building
or refreshing an in-house data center and as few enterprise data
centers will be able to deal on their own with the requirements of
digital transformation. Yet digital transformation does not mean the
disappearance of the enterprise data center but it means a changed
role based on its processing, storage and networking specifications.
MTDCs see digital transformation as an opportunity and a
considerable challenge. Whether enterprise or service facility,
the majority of MTDCs cluster at the slower end of an adoption
spectrum, conducting piecemeal projects and are still to embark on
the holistic re-setting of their company that transformation looks
for. The data center as centerpiece of the digital business may act as
a brake – since the compute requirements for the company’s own
IoT and analytics is compute that is not available for client use.
Most MTDCs (in particular smaller local and regional operators)
have evolved relatively recently out of their own legacy era of being
based on space, racks, power and connectivity whether on-prem
or outsourced. While there is now a considerable move towards
services and, in situations where the facility oers sucient levels of
scalability, convergence and control, there is also a trend towards
oering cloud. Across the MTDC sector there are a variety of
business models, contractual arrangements and delivery methods
and no consistent path whereby MTDCs achieve their own digital
transformation.
However MTDCs have devised a number of dierent ways to
deal with the major threat to their customer base – cloud. These
ways include developing their own (if they have the capacity
and expertise), buying into private cloud and developing hybrid
cloud models, accessing it through interconnectivity or through
their facility eco-system, or through other forms of partnership
since cloud providers outside the global giants rely on service
facilities to house their cloud bases. The approach to IoT, analytic
and security will be similar, particularly in the need to develop
strong partnerships and expertise in updating not only their
technological capacity but their business models. As with any digital
transformation the process returns technology back to
the business.