Data gravity will increasingly weigh on businesses and IT professionals, whether they start preparing for it now or wait until there’s no other choice. 

More people are logging into networks with more devices every day, generating ever more data that inevitably pulls applications and services toward it. Understanding data gravity and its impact on IT strategy will be critical for businesses across industries.

Data should be readily available for access by applications and services, regardless of location, but the gravity of large data sets can trap them in one place. This fact should make the matter a key strategic concern for IT professionals, who must figure out how to prevent data sets from becoming unwieldy. Accomplishing that, however, is not so simple, nor will the answer be uniform across organizations. Each will need to develop their own solutions based on their circumstances.

Companies that find a way to manage data gravity well will find it to be a competitive differentiator. Despite the unique variables each organization faces, the approach should be two-pronged: maintain multiple centers where data processes occur, and design an architecture where applications, compute and storage resources move efficiently within and throughout those centers. The cloud is not a silver bullet to manage these tasks.

Hybrid or multi-cloud operations through colocation data centers is one solution, but companies must then determine the best geological distribution. Seemingly, the best answer is to expand in major urban centers, but there is another way: focusing on data hubs in multi-tenant data centers near cloud campuses at the edge. 

As a result, edge data centers will need to get ready to accommodate tenants wanting hybrid or multi-cloud solutions, and they will need to work with cloud-based models to effectively manage data. They will also need to prepare for more bandwidth as processing increases. 

It will take a collaborative approach to solve data gravity among various stakeholders, including content providers, edge data centers and enterprise IT teams. Cloud solutions cannot do it alone. It will also take carrier-neutral data centers.

Be sure to check out the article by 1623’s own Bill Severn, Data Gravity at the Edge: How ‘Data Hubs’ and Edge Data Centers Can Help featured on Edge Industry Review.