The growing importance of data across sectors is pointing at an expected rise in the number of data centres across the world. Data being termed as the new oil has also found more relevance during this pandemic. Very recently, Microsoft has set up an undersea data centre in Orkney Islands, Scotland. The purpose of this data centre is to understand the viral proteins that cause COVID-19.
Data has been used by hospital staff and scientists for analytical purposes as well. With data analytics, they are able to better prepare for future scenarios and identify potential hotspots.
Data Analytics: A Weapon For The World To Battle The Pandemic
Let us understand data centres better.
What is are data centres?
In the simplest terms, a data centre is a physical space where data and applications are stored for organisations. It can be one building or a group of buildings that has a wide range of computer systems and other components needed to house data.
The components mainly include storage systems, routers, application delivery controllers, firewalls and servers. Apart from this technical equipment, a data centre also looks after the hardware and software with power supply, cooling systems, power subsystems, backup generators and more.
The design of a data centre allows the delivery of shared applications and data through a computing network.
Modern data centres
In the past few years, there has been immense advancement in data centres. They have moved to virtual networks rather than physical servers to support a multi-cloud environment that we now live in.
Data is now being connected, stored and processed through multiple data centres via edge computing, public and private clouds. A public cloud is actually a collection of data centres. When cloud is used to host applications, resources from data centre are used by the cloud.
The most common Google Cloud has all the data stored in a data centre which communicates with the system when the user demands to see it.
Why Is It Important For Businesses?
For any business, adapting to new technology is crucial for survival. Even though a business is able to manage tasks with traditional methods, to compete in the industry it will have to update. Data centres would ease the workload because they would be carrying it. Here is how your business will benefit with data centres:
- You can easily share files across via your email. For Gmail users, everything is saved in the cloud and you can choose who gets access to your documents.
- Not just documents, all your presentations, graphs, worksheets, videos, etc can be stored and accessed from anywhere.
- A database helps an organisation in multiple ways- Customer Relationship Management, resource planning and more.
- It powers the deployment and development of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms
- Communication and collaboration are easy when all parties have access to the same data and it is easy to use.
Summing Up…
There are many types of data centres depending on their purpose- Enterprise data centres, cloud data centres, managed services data centres and colocation data centres. Most enterprises have their own data centres for their operations, for example, Amazon uses its data centre for storing and accessing data on its private cloud for its warehousing, orders, delivery, management, and other services. The modern data centre is the centre around which the world is advancing.
