How has COVID affected Datacenters?

A year ago it was officially declared that COVID-19 became a pandemic. This led to house confinements for weeks, states of alarm, the cessation of many economic activities and many restrictions on mobility. These restrictions, still active, have changed many of our activities: meetings are dangerous, travel is a risk to be avoided ... and the digital infrastructure has suddenly encountered a big wave of change in the way we work.

How has this massive change in the way we use the Internet affected the datacenters and networks that make this change possible? Is the infrastructure built to manage it? Are the companies running it properly prepared?

The reasons for the change

With hundreds of millions of people working from home for most of the year, the demand for cloud computing has reached record highs. The concept of digital transformation, which basically means that companies are turning on-premise processes into digital or online processes, has been a driving force for organizations of all kinds this 2020.

Not only the digital transformation of companies has been a determining factor. This pandemic has led to a huge use of digital applications for video calling, e-commerce, e-learning… which have led to a necessary increase in capabilities. In addition, these applications are already part of everyday life and use is more likely not to decrease drastically.

Hyperscalers

The acceleration of digitization by most sectors has led to a huge increase in demand for colocation and IaaS services, mainly offered by Hyperscalers.

The term hyperscale defines the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately with increasing system needs, whether computing, memory, or networking.

For all those companies that have had to adapt to change, the best solution has been adopting the solutions offered by the main Hyperscale vendors, which are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. During 2020, they have made a large investment to be able to offer the possibility of scaling up to all those companies that needed to adapt to change.

Automation

Process automation is another aspect that has been accelerated due to the pandemic. Because efforts are currently being made to avoid mobility and contacts, more datacenters have evolved into more remote monitoring and automation of routine services, such as updates management.

In addition, security measures are not the only compelling reason to move forward with automation. The massive growth of digital data, produced mainly by confinements, implies that monitoring, troubleshooting and performing routine tasks can be too slow and inefficient.

In conclusion, 2020 has been a year that has brought a drastic change in people’s lives, which has led to a major boost to datacenter technologies and the digital transformation of thousands of businesses.

Pol Centelles Perxés