It’s imperative in the current climate to ensure that your business data is secure and accessible, particularly as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown the impact that unexpected events can have on organizations. If one thing is for certain, you can’t anticipate everything, and your business needs to be ready, which is why now is the time for analysis of your current infrastructure strategy. Whether you’ve chosen the route of on-premise data hosting or a colocation strategy in a prominent data center, there are likely to still be infrastructure risks in your data strategy that the pandemic has highlighted. Now is the time to use the situation we all find ourselves in as a springboard for bringing your infrastructure closer.

Look beyond central hubs

Ensuring that your users and customers have seamless access to data is crucial to remaining competitive in a digitized market. If you’re currently utilizing colocation, you’ll be fully aware of the benefits it provides, but there’s still an opportunity for optimization through analysis of which connections your business is using, as you may be paying a premium for extra carriers that you’re not using. In today’s climate, is that a risk you want to take?

In a similar way, storing data in a London-based data center may seem the obvious choice due to more interconnections, but you may have also considered a more local data center as an alternative, and there’s clear advantages to moving outside the capital. London-based centers are focused on two major hubs, and their collective failure in the event of a national grid outage could be problematic in terms of downtime, so now is the time look beyond.

Power-up with proximity

In addition to the obvious benefits of reduced latency due to short distances and less traffic, use of a local data center gives you the time to monitor infrastructure closely and meet third-party representatives face-to-face when needed. Conversely, a poor location choice can lead to inefficiency in data processing.

Understandably, much of your day-to-day concern rests on continuous maintenance and upgrades of your environment, and there are obvious impracticalities of travelling long distances to make beneficial changes to your infrastructure on-site. As you battle the challenges around data sovereignty post-Brexit, gaining clarity on whether your business data will remain in the UK can enable you to benefit from peace of mind moving forward.

With a close eye on the take up of 5G and increased adoption of IoT, you’re no doubt considering the benefits of adopting an Edge computing model. Increased proximity will help play its part here with localized data centers delivering edge services via grid-like architecture as opposed to data sent to centralized hubs.

Removing risk with a regional approach

More and more organizations are now following the lead of forward-thinking businesses and are shifting infrastructure outside of their organization to facilitate increased data volumes and requirements and expand their digital transformation capabilities. While your data center strategy is likely to be well-established, it’s more than worth taking a fresh look at the current location of your environment to check if it is truly supporting your organization.

Shifting your data and infrastructure to a regional location can allow your business to take advantage of the same connections and benefits as a London-based data center, but also prove fruitful in reducing operational costs. Moving your infrastructure to a regional data center provider with a global reach can also provide benefits in terms of a personalized and bespoke customer service, while you may find that ultimately spreading your estate across multiple sites is more beneficial.

While data centers of all types provide a plethora of benefits, utilizing a strategically located regional data center is pivotal in allowing your organization to grow in conjunction with cost-effectively scaling your footprint, particularly as the situation surrounding Covid-19 is expected to ease in the latter part of the year and more business opportunities present themselves as markets recover. In addition, choosing the right external provider allows for ultimate peace of mind by ensuring that your data and infrastructure is close by, easily accessible and always held in the UK.