In an era where modern commerce is inseparable from technology, digital transformation has become crucial for businesses to survive and thrive in all markets.
Scotland has led the way in understanding the impact of this shift. In August 2023, the Independent Expert Group (IEG) on Unlocking the Value of Data delivered its report to the Digital Directorate, covering private sector use of public sector personal data. The Data-Driven Innovation initiative, based out of the University of Edinburgh has established six collaboration hubs to help ten industrial sectors become more innovative through data.
And throughout the private sector, data has revolutionised Scottish businesses and opened new opportunities. From the gaming excellence of Rockstar North and Earthbound to the data created by the £2.5bn offshore windfarm industry, digital transformation is driving the Scottish economy.
This has resulted in the digital sector amounting to more than 11,000 registered businesses in Scotland (just over 6% of the entire business base), employing more than 87,000 people and generating £5.9bn[1].
At the heart of this, sits the hardware and connectivity of a data centre. These facilities have undergone a profound, rapid evolution. They are no longer just data storage warehouses or offsite factories for computational heavy lifting.
Data centres and digital growth
As a business embraces substantial digital growth, it needs to explore the benefits of a data centre. These businesses recognise that they cannot continue with racks of servers on premises to scale. Equally, they cannot invest millions in their own offsite facility, and they cannot necessarily risk putting their digital future into the hands of a large, ‘hyperscale’ cloud facility.
Instead, these companies seek a digital infrastructure partner that can provide them with the resilience, opportunity, and the connections they need.
The first hallmark of such a partner is a local, regional presence and facility. Typically, this equates to a data centre no more than two hours away from the point of data creation.
These shorter distances mean lower latency - technically, it is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from one designated point to another. The lower the latency, the better. This was initially because it meant a better user experience, but following the dawn of real-time data analytics, machine-to-machine communication and, of course, AI, latency has become a critical competitive advantage.
Aside from this local connection, the second hallmark of a genuine infrastructure partner is the ability to connect your business to an ecosystem of service providers. This forms the very fabric of your business growth. Data centres should be entry points for expansion: from local to regional, regional to national and national to global.
This means that they need to offer connectivity beyond the local facility. We have invested heavily in connecting our 12 Pulsant data centres with a resilient, high-speed private network and have partnered with SD-WAN providers, peering and internet exchanges.
The dividend of colocation should be that a company can realise agility and speed in the here and now, without sacrificing the flexibility it needs to grow. Deciding on a data centre is the first step in developing a partnership with your digital infrastructure provider. As such, that partner should be able to yield immediate improvement and future benefits.
[1] See Edinburgh's Path to Data Excellence | Accenture
Driving growth for Scottish businesses
Scotland is home to some of the fastest-growing technology and financial organisations in the UK.
With three colocation facilities located in Edinburgh, Pulsant offer the most connected data centres in Scotland and north of London, with high density solutions supported by a 100GB national network connecting to the rest of the UK.
Pulsant’s national colocation footprint enables businesses to expand their reach geographically with access to an extensive ecosystem of clients, partners and service providers.
Connected by a private, high-speed network, Pulsant’s data centres deliver ultimate flexibility in cost, scalability and performance, enabling Scottish businesses to deploy infrastructure at the network edge.