In recent years, the technological landscape has undergone a radical transformation, pushing companies to adopt increasingly advanced and data-driven infrastructures. At the center of this digital revolution we find i data centers, essential infrastructures to support the growing need for data processing and storage. With the advent of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the question is no longer whether data centers will be central to the digital future, but how they will evolve to remain competitive and effectively respond to the needs of a rapidly changing market.
In the following interview, Marco Matarazzo, Director of IBX Operations at Equinix Italia will help us understand how data center companies, like Equinix, are preparing to respond to these challenges through innovation and the adoption of sustainable practices, the growing importance of high-performance colocation, expansion into new strategic markets and the physical security of infrastructure.
How do you see the data center market evolving over the next 5 years and what are the trends that you think will influence the sector?
Digital transformation has already revolutionized the way companies operate and will continue to shape the future of the global economy from an increasingly digitalized and data-driven perspective. However, all of this, even without the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, clearly cannot happen without modern and highly efficient infrastructures that support this evolution. Data centers will therefore be essential, there is no doubt about this, but we must ask ourselves which types will be the most important and what type of services they will have to offer to be competitive.
Going beyond the need to collect the right data, analyze it and prioritize it based on latency and security requirements, we believe that the most successful companies will be those that get the most value from their digital ecosystems, and that this trend will continue to accelerate in the future, to the point where digital ecosystems will be an essential part of every company’s operations. In this sense, high-performance colocation data centers not only provide space and energy, but also offer access to entire ecosystems, geographic opportunities and advanced digital services to help companies overcome their most important challenges.
At the same time, whether it’s distributed infrastructure, hybrid multicloud, or efficiency innovations, businesses are demanding more from colocation providers than ever before. Infrastructure must be AI-ready and be ready to support technological innovations with sustainable innovations, both in terms of efficiency, i.e. reducing unnecessary energy consumption, and in terms of recycling, helping to supply local networks from renewable sources and to reuse the energy generated for the benefit of surrounding communities.
Furthermore, to meet the future needs of enterprises, data center providers must progressively prioritize cloud provider neutrality and prepare to expand into new markets to enrich their interconnected global platform in new strategic locations. At Equinix, we are committed to meeting these expectations through our global presence of Equinix IBX colocation data centers – we recently announced the acquisition of three data centers in the Philippines and just opened a new site in South Africa in Johannesburg –
our advanced digital services like Equinix Fabric and Equinix Metal and our documented leadership in sustainability.
In an age where cloud and virtualization dominate the technology conversation, what is still the value of the physicality of data centers? How does Equinix balance the evolution towards virtual with the need to maintain and protect a robust physical infrastructure?
Most people don’t think about data centers in their daily lives. Even as they use the Internet for entertainment, directions, banking, shopping and more, they fail to consider that there are physical buildings that enable all of this.
The term “cloud computing,” in particular, makes one believe that all the “magic” happens somewhere in the atmosphere and that the virtual network is a more advanced replacement for the physical network and that physical connectivity will become less important over time. But this is absolutely not the case. The best way to network is to use a hybrid approach that allows you to get the best of both worlds, the scalability of the physical network and the flexibility of the virtual one depending on different use cases.
For example, physical connections are suitable for any situation that requires direct access to digital ecosystem partners in a particular location to exchange high levels of sustained traffic with very low latency and world-class security and reliability.
On the contrary, virtual connections are ideal for those application areas where data routing or capacity requirements may change frequently, as in the case of media companies that broadcast large global sporting events and may experience strong, but temporary, traffic spikes. .
As a digital infrastructure company, Equinix is uniquely positioned to meet the hybrid network needs of enterprises and service providers around the world, now and in the future. With us, businesses can set up a network connection to move data from one site to another in minutes, using it to bring together their distributed digital infrastructure or connect with their ecosystem of partners and service providers. As the business’s needs change, they can modify the connection accordingly, without having to touch the hardware on which the connections were built.
Data centers are often considered sensitive targets for physical and cyber threats. What specific strategies does Equinix implement to protect this vital infrastructure from an ever-evolving threat landscape? What is Equinix’s approach to resilience and incident recovery?
Data centers are essential infrastructures for daily digital life and, as such, also extremely sensitive.
Security, therefore, is a concept inherent to the very notion of data centers, which in Equinix is tangible starting from the five security layers that must be overcome before being able to enter the IBX and access one’s equipment. Surveillance is active 24/7 and strengthened by the possibility of activating a real lockdown remotely.
However, since the objective of a data center in terms of reliability is to remain constantly active without interruptions, the material security aspect to pay even more attention to is certainly the ability to react to adverse climatic events.
Suffice it to say that at Equinix we design our data centers taking into account climatic extremes for the next fifty years and we adopt different strategies to obtain maximum stability of our services, managing the risk firstly with the selection of the locations of the new data centers and secondly place by identifying the requirements that will help protect the building in the event of phenomena such as flooding or anomalous heat waves.
Instead, as regards cybersecurity, we have long adopted the zero-trust approach to guarantee the security of our services and our structures to customers and have worked to implement the latest IAM methods and tools and simplify identity management and access. Specifically, we have successfully implemented Role-based access control (RBAC), where an administrator defines the organizational resource hierarchy and then uses RBAC for that resource hierarchy.
Our products themselves are built to have built-in cybersecurity: Platform Equinix embeds security at all stages of development to deliver secure interconnection to hybrid clouds, and Equinix Fabric shortens the distance between compute and data and gives operations full control of own data and security perimeters. But of course we are also collaborating with top security companies to provide cutting-edge security systems and seamless user experiences. One example is our recent collaboration with Oracle Cloud for a successful validation that demonstrates how customers can use MACsec encryption on a global scale to protect data in transit in the cloud.
