How to Choose a Data Center Partner that Accelerates Your Business Growth

Dennis Mccatty, Vice President of Sales – Global Channels and Alliances

As enterprises join the race to build and leverage artificial intelligence (AI)-powered efficiencies, IT service providers must evaluate the partnerships that offer their customers a platform that future-proofs their growth.

Each day, IT leaders deploy applications and technology that create and consume large amounts of data—more and more of it at the edge. Incremental data creation puts a tremendous strain on legacy infrastructure, creates Data Gravity, and increases latency. Enterprise leaders must evaluate their data location strategies as they look for ways to scale their AI initiatives.

According to IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2024 Predictions, “by 2025, 50% of enterprises will break with the public cloud migration trend and primarily deploy HPC on premises, at a managed services provider or at a colocation provider.”¹

As more businesses look to get out of the data center business and move to hybrid, multi-cloud environments, IT service providers should look for colocation partners who offer extensibility, flexibility, and a global footprint.

This blog gives service providers a set of considerations as they evaluate digital infrastructure partnerships to meet their customers’ evolving infrastructure requirements.

Why implement a global data center solution?

For service providers – partnering with a data center partner that has an extensive global footprint delivers a shared value proposition that accelerates time to value for you and your customers.

For your customers – providing a data center solution that addresses the critical infrastructure challenges IT and business leaders face enables them to achieve:

1. Scale and agility
2. Global growth and compliance
3. Consistent and sustainable infrastructure stability

1. Achieve scale with a winning, open ecosystem that empowers business agility

As modern IT leaders look for ways to attain efficiencies in their infrastructure strategies, they see the advantages of moving towards a hybrid, multi-cloud environment that allows flexibility. As they adopt AI to deploy business competencies at scale, they increasingly need infrastructure that can:

• Manage highly dense workloads
• Offer interconnection solutions that improve latency
• Ensure a reliable and resilient infrastructure that minimizes the potential for service disruption

Service providers advising enterprise customers with these challenges increasingly look to partners like Digital Realty, who offer an open ecosystem.

What does an open ecosystem mean? This system allows partners to focus on their core services without worrying about competing with the platform they use. For example, Digital Realty delivers comprehensive data center services that set your customers up for success.

We focus on addressing customer needs with an extensive portfolio of carrier-neutral data centers, industry-leading interconnection, and a global footprint of colocation services.

2. Realize global growth with a trusted platform

Businesses need data centers that can handle more computing power, storage space, and speed to accommodate AI-driven growth. Digital Realty has data centers worldwide that can grow with your customers. These data centers allow businesses to quickly expand their IT infrastructure as needed without increasing their internal infrastructure complexity.

Digital Realty’s PlatformDIGITAL®, the global data center platform to host critical infrastructure and interconnect digital ecosystems, provides customers with a trusted foundation to:

• Solve global coverage, capacity, and ecosystem connectivity needs with a single data center provider
• Tailor infrastructure deployments and controls matched to business needs irrespective of data center size, scale, location, configuration, and/or ecosystem interconnections
• Operate deployments as a seamless extension of any global infrastructure with the consistent experience, security, and resiliency that business demands
• Enable globally distributed workflows at centers of data exchange to remove Data Gravity barriers and scale digital business
• Allow businesses to connect centers of data exchange with a suite of on-demand services, simplifying infrastructure delivery and enabling revenue growth using ServiceFabric™, a PlatformDIGITAL® product family

Digital Realty’s global data center platform is trusted by over 5,000+ customers including over 1,500+ enterprises, 1,300+ network service providers and over 1,100+ cloud and IT providers which form our global connected data community to support our customers’ Hybrid IT needs.

3. Deliver exceptional customer experience through consistent services and sustainable practices

Customers require a fit-for-purpose platform that grows with them. On their list of requirements is a platform solution with a strong, financial portfolio and trusted service delivery.

Digital Realty has 18 years of consecutive revenue growth with a focus on service resiliency. With an industry-leading uptime of 99.999%, customers trust our record of providing reliable, secure, and compliant data center services.

As sustainability expectations and regulations increase, partners’ priorities must evolve to focus on ESG. Many businesses are reconfiguring their logistics networks and establishing new partnerships to streamline supply chains and work toward the common goal of accounting for climate contributions.

As customers increasingly use applications and technologies that produce more and more data, they will continue to look for ways to offset their environmental impact. And, they'll strategically choose data center providers that align with their corporate objectives and those that share their sustainability goals.

Digital Realty is focused on rigorous ESG practices, with 910 MW renewable capacity, 34 Energy Star certified data centers, and a 68% global carbon reduction target.

Get the Digital Realty Global Partner Program advantage

Our partners choose Digital Realty's program for access to a global network of leading-edge data center services. Partners rely on our diverse portfolio of solutions, robust support and resources, and a flexible partnership framework to drive value for their customers—and grow their businesses. All without investing in expensive infrastructure outside their core areas of expertise.

Interested in learning more about our expansive global partner ecosystem and program benefits? Learn more about our Partner Program or contact a Digital Realty Partner Manager directly.

¹IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2024 Predictions, 2023