COVID-19 has been a wakeup call for businesses across the world, reminding us of the importance of embracing digital transformation in a future that will be heavily driven by automation. The market landscape has become more competitive with only those business winning that can respond faster to the customers’ needs. Adoption of Edge and Hyperscale data centres have received a lot of attention during these past months, as businesses struggle to maintain continuity, cope with changing customer requirements and look for real-time, low-cost solutions.

With everything having gone virtual, sectors such as healthcare, retail, education, gaming, social media, on-demand entertainment content have seen tremendous growth and digitalisation. A report by IDC stated that by 2025, the average person will interact with a smart device nearly 4,800 times a day, which is triple our usage today. This growing digital data necessitates faster and real-time processing to reduce market response time. Latency becomes a major factor as the majority of businesses are migrating their critical data to the cloud, that not only inhibits the ability to work efficiently, but also makes it harder to maintain a stable environment at the same time.

Here, Edge data centres are a natural response to both the increasing demand for Internet content and the trend towards more networks moving directly into the cloud. Edge data centres increase network performance while reducing latency to a large extent. This aspect is most desirable, especially during a time when faster response time is absolutely vital in order to ensure work order and efficiency while the workforce is largely distributed. Over the next few years, we can expect to see a steady rise in the demand for edge data centres owing to the fact that data is processed at the edge rather than in a centralised and distant data centre. Processing in a centralised data centre means relocation of mission-critical data which delays its processing – edge data centres are a solution to latency problem, allowing real-time processing of data and faster response time. As per a recent report, edge data centres are expected to reach USD 9.76 Billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 15.6% over the forecast period.

With the substantial rise in IoT devices and India striving to achieve higher levels of digital transformation, one can decipher how this would be advantageous in an environment where working from home has become a norm and most of the traffic received is now directed from the massive surge in online activity from an increased amount of digital content like e-retail, online education, entertainment sectors, etc. This brings in the aspects of agility and scalability of IT infrastructure. In this volatile market scenario, businesses must be prepared for everything – that means having an architecture that expands and contracts based on the business’s immediate requirements. This scalability is seamless and requires a robust framework with flexible capabilities in memory, networking and storage. Again, here edge data centres score higher than other options.

A hyperscale model is one that works with thousands of individual servers that are made to work together using a high-speed network. With the increased demand for scalable applications and increased storage spaces for businesses, hyperscale data centres are based on the premise of scalability of one’s business operations while improving the business efficiency simultaneously. A simple analogy would be expanding your shop in order to add more products which leads to more products being sold in the end.

Many industry giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft have invested big on building these hyperscale data centres, in an attempt towards their futuristic vision and end goal by understanding the need for these data centres in today’s internet-based data-driven world. According to new data released by Synergy research group, there are 176 hyperscale data centres that are being developed over the past 12 months. In a world where businesses are surviving on the basis of work from home, this new formed norm and business environment needs efficiency and quick response time which these data centres are based on. In order to quickly respond to their consumers and provide a seamless experience for them, businesses adopting these ways are thus catering better to the needs of the ever-changing business scenarios.