This announcement is central to the company’s focus on placing the converged data centre at the heart of the Hybrid IT ecosystem for corporations and Cloud providers. The new platform is the result of a significant investment policy (equating to ˆ100M allocated between 2016 and 2017) and is now available across all of DATA4’s data centres.
DATA4 has made significant investments in order to create this hyper-connected data centre, in which enterprise customers can consolidate their IT in an environment that offers both dedicated colocation and secure access to public cloud applications. By connecting to the ‘Digital Hub’, DATA4’s customers and partners will gain direct access to one hundred and ten (110) Cloud destinations (including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Softlayer, Google Cloud, VCloud Air and Salesforce). The ‘Digital Hub’ is geographically agnostic and based on private, secure, reliable connections, with this entire service backed by end-to-end guarantees.
J?r?me Totel, VP of DATA4 Products, explains: “We at DATA4 are adamant that it is essential that the data centre is positioned at the intersection where private and public Cloud meet. Whilst at present 77% of IT Managers have expressed concern about implementing some form of Hybrid IT (see recent study “Data center outsourcing: a new paradigm for the Hybrid I.T. Era”” conducted by the analyst firm DCD Intelligence), this platform of services, entirely dedicated to this type of infrastructure, enables them to retain control of their data, whether it is hosted in the Cloud or not, and also benefit from comprehensive service guarantees. Our role is to address these concerns and to demonstrate that we can provide secure, low-latency Hybrid IT solutions.” LOCAL DATA CENTRES WITH GLOBAL REACH IN THE CLOUD
As such, the DATA4 ‘Digital Hub’ (see diagram) extends the data centre to the entire global digital ecosystem, based on direct and private access to:
? A European data centre network grouping together all DATA4 data centre campuses within a single logical data centre facilitating the delivery of inter-campus Ethernet services;
? Dozens of telecommunications operators, ensuring that each customer can connect with their own virtual private network (VPN);
? Dozens of Internet service providers (ISPs), so that each customer can open their platform to the Internet;
? All European Internet exchange nodes (IX: Internet eXchange) in a few milliseconds, at very high speed, such as AMS-IX, DE-CIX, France-IX, LINX, LU-CIX, MIX;
? 110 Cloud destinations of all types (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), with a direct, private, end-to-end connection to the data centres in which the Cloud solutions are hosted.
J?r?me Totel states: “In terms of the last two points – IX and Cloud – we offer secure, cost-effective access to one hundred and ten different Cloud destinations and to the European IX from all of DATA4’s data centres. What’s more, direct access to both Cloud and IX resources is implemented with short installation time frames (one week); while destination change delays are even shorter (one day).”
THE KEY TO HYBRID IT
Most traditional data centres, particularly on-premises enterprise data centres, have been designed with a view towards consolidation, where centralised applications and Internet access are available to users via a private network.
Today, however, very few companies rely 100% on applications hosted on their own premises and even fewer still rely 100% on cloud applications. Therefore the Cloud does have a role to play within the company’s IT ecosystem but only when combined efficiently and securely with the proprietary business applications on which the company's information system relies.
Adam Levine, DATA4 GROUP Chief Commercial Officer, states: “Thanks to our 'Digital Hub', which offers geographically agnostic, private connections to multiple cloud solutions, each IT Management entity will be able to adapt its Cloud facilities in real time. As such, our enterprise customers will gain a strategic competitive advantage through access to this new level of flexibility”.
DATA4 invested ˆ50M in 2016 and is set to invest the same amount in 2017 to finance the construction of new data centres, strengthen its R&D and work on the design of a new generation data centre by 2018. At the same time, the Group is heavily committed to a policy of sustainable development, setting itself the objective of having a “greener” energy mix from 2018, and ultimately reaching the goal of 100% renewable power usage.
