Finally, a particularly challenging year has come to an end. While we cannot be exactly sure what is on the horizon for 2021, we can surely breathe a sigh of relief for making it through a year of unexpected obstacles and the adjustment to a “new normal”. Now, we have learned quite a few lessons and can look forward to a promising year ahead. And while 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic was a year unlike any other, we were still able to accomplish some pretty amazing things and navigate the year’s trends.
Colocation as Important as Ever
One of the largest data center trends we saw throughout this past year was the rise in colocation. While there were fears that colocation would become obsolete due to increased cloud migration, that turned out not to be the case at all. Major rises in workload demands and Big Data have made it necessary for businesses to move operations closer to end-users, which can get expensive very quickly. As businesses tapped out their facility’s capacity, they turned to colocation to stay competitive and operational while amassing mass amounts of data to process.
Colocation also decreases the amount of downtime due to potential issues by offering failover support in case of critical issues. As 2020 saw a massive increase to online traffic as everyone shifted their work, school and entertainment to an online platform, minimizing downtime became as critical as ever. Yet another reason we saw so many businesses and enterprises turn to colocation.
Looking to the Cloud
For years our industry has been buzzing with discussions of the cloud, and 2020 was no different. As we mentioned colocation earlier, cloud migrations were also undertaken hand-in-hand to create hybrid environments for businesses to carry out their functions. Cloud migrations offer businesses practically limitless scalability opportunities, making it an attractive initiative. And, with the data and internet usage trends sparked by the pandemic in 2020, the cloud was a welcome solution.
How We at 1623 Kept Up
One of the things we were sure to address from the beginning of 2020 was upgrading our facility to give our customers the best of the best. We began a $40 million expansion project to build out our facility’s space and install some state of the art cooling options. With more efficient cooling and more 
available space, we are able to provide cutting edge services while expanding our capacity for new and existing clients, thereby expanding our ecosystem. But our facility is not the only thing we’ve expanded! We added Greg Elliott to our team as VP of Business Development to work alongside Linn Gowen, VP of Sales and Marketing, as we planned for a year of growth and advancement despite the challenging environment.
We also made sure to keep our customers and employees safe amidst the uncertain environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic. We acted quickly to limit the number of employees on site only to critical services ensuring our equipment was up and running for our customers, and made sure that our remote hands services were available. We had remarkable employees step up in times of need, and helped deliver the high quality service our customers are accustomed to even in the global crisis.
And to address industry trends, we partnered with Google as their exclusive low-latency direct connection to their US Central 1 facility, only a few miles away from 1623 Farnam. Our customers are able to connect easily to the Google cloud with minimal hops, therefore increasing their cloud capabilities without breaking the bank. And, our partnership with Megaport even further expanded our cloud ecosystem to give our customers even more options to create the ideal environment for their workloads.
2020 was a challenging yet surprisingly productive year at 1623 Farnam. We are proud that we have been able to make the best of the situation by making it a priority to keep employees safe and customers happy. It was not easy, but we made it through! We are eager to see how we will continue to adapt to the “new normal” that 2020 has introduced and see how we will come out on the other side of the pandemic ready to provide the best in low-latency, highly reliable connections and services for our customers.