Despite the consolidation trend, businesses are continuing to expand their data centres for a variety of reasons, including redundancy of the centralised data centre for backup, a more comprehensive disaster recovery plan, and improved uptime at regional offices.
The business world is moving at a rapid pace to keep up with the overwhelming demand for information and the need to monetise and operationalise raw data. With the ever-changing demands of the modern business model, many companies place their trust in data centres, as these facilities play a critical role in meeting their IT requirements.
Data centres are more than just safe and secure facilities with reliable power and network connectivity. They are quickly becoming a valuable asset to many businesses, proving to be a dependable extension of their IT team. As a result, data centres are increasingly becoming an essential component of modern business start-ups. In this scenario, data centres become crucial to progress and are no different for the Philippines.
Another data centre will be developed in the Philippines by the end of this year. A leading e-commerce giant will be setting out a new data centre as part of an aggressive US$1 billion plan to expand its presence across Southeast Asia. The main objective is to expand the scope of its services, which include elastic computing, databases, security, machine learning and data analytics.
The new data centre will be constructed in the capital Manila and bring the company’s total number of availability zones or data centre to 76, spread across 25 regions worldwide. By developing the data centre, local businesses across sectors such as financial technology, e-commerce, education and media will be able to adopt and implement cloud technologies more efficiently, and better position themselves to capture the emerging opportunities in the country.
The centre would provide training in technology and businesses skillsets, as well as a platform on which start-ups would be able to interact with experienced entrepreneurs and industry experts as mentors.
Just last year, the company’s cloud computing subsidiary announced the formation of the Philippines Ecosystem Alliance, an initiative designed to accelerate the digitalisation of local businesses and support the government’s cloud-first policy. By 2023, the company also intends to train 50,000 local IT professionals and assist 5,000 businesses in migrating online.
An article by OpenGov Asia reported that as smart cities flourish amidst rapid urbanisation and information and communication technology development, the demand for building more data centres is rising. Major corporations, establishments and governments need data centres as a mission-critical facility to enable countless electronic transactions to take place any minute of the day. Their functional importance ranges from health, transport, payment, etc., all the way to entertainment activities.
Data centres have become the industrial world’s powerhouses as technology has advanced. However, because technology is a constantly evolving process, so is the way businesses operate. This has an impact on the amount of data and power required.
An increase in resource requirements is sometimes too much for many businesses to handle internally with their existing infrastructure. To maintain such high demand, the company may need to invest many hours and personnel. Data centres in such businesses enable them to outsource their power requirements.
Internet usage and social media trends have increased demand for faster internet networks as well as data centres to store the data generated by them. Internet penetration is one of the most powerful drivers of the Southeast Asian data centre market. Other major factors promoting data centre growth include consumer use of social media and digital transformation by businesses across industry verticals.