We are living on the Era of streaming and digital entertainment. According to Data Market Forecast report, the main online video content providers in Latin America will invoice US$851MM by 2025, twice as much the amount collected 5 years ago.  Furthermore, Statista, the statistic portal for market data, points out that the gaming market in the region could exceed the barrier of US$3.6 Billion by year end. 

Behind this whole phenomenon there’s an underlying primary challenge for data centers – how to address high connectivity requests posed by this huge number of users trying to access these resources, which in turn call for very high bandwidth and efficiency levels.  

Data traffic growth related to digital entertainment is exponential, while users are increasingly demanding.  Unlike what happened with free-to-air TV -barely a few years ago-, when someone would spend a big deal of time moving antennas or hitting the device to get a good signal, digital entertainment consumers today want top image quality (usually 4K) and true real-time broadcast, without delays or pixels.  From the industry business standpoint, a very high, almost absolute availability is required – any signal outage could mean losing customers.  

To tackle all these challenges, data centers need to be more resilient than ever before.  Flexible and scalable to grow on demand, and capable to include new technologies to achieve these goals.  Redundant to ensure seamless service, with high speed connectivity and great bandwidth to support a volume that will not stop growing, and with self-service proposals to allow digital entertainment industry businesses accompany business movements without delays, and vendor-agnostic. 

Content distribution networks

Content Distribution Networks (CDN, for its acronym in English) are particularly positioned as a perfect solution — edge structure and caching storage systems to take data processing where content is consumed to significantly decrease latency and ensure an excellent user experience, even under specific situations such as a large scale, live event broadcast (concert, relevant sport final). 

They bring in technologies, such as load balancer, to dynamically commute between different networks based on where demand takes place or on the location of the highest performance network, optimized routing or end-to-end security (industry suffers both with cyberattacks that jeopardize service continuity, and piracy-related vulnerabilities of the broadcasted content itself). 

Another significant advance is given by software-defined networks.  They simplify network management and configuration – all workloads, across the full range of connectivity types, can be viewed, coordinated, and controlled through a centralized, automated, real-time platform, including routing, traffic thresholds, security, and access policies. 

While all this happens deep down the network, on the surface the miracle occurs: users watch what they want to, when they want to, on the device of their choice and with the highest quality.

Author:

Gabriel del Campo
VP Data Center, Cloud & Security
Cirion Technologies

Key Steps for a Successful Hybrid Cloud Migration

The benefits delivered by hybrid cloud to businesses are so tangible that adoption levels are reaching an extraordinary extent.   Indeed, the fact that organizations have maximum flexibility to keep up with business growth, agility to assimilate high-speed changes, and resilience to ensure business continuity means that now, more than 90% of businesses are considering maintaining or increase their expenditure and use of cloud, according to Flexera Cloud Report 2023.

Cloud migration is no longer an option — it’s the pathway for companies to lean on an always modern infrastructure with the latest technologies to innovate, generate new customer experiences, or even anticipate market demands. However, if the right steps are not taken at the right time, migration can be costly and complex.

Five keys we would like to share for a smooth transition. 

1. Leadership support: Cloud migration is a business decision, not just a technological implementation. Therefore, if it is part of the company’s digital transformation strategy and is endorsed by the organization’s leaders, chances of success and sustainability are significantly higher for this project.

2. Focus on the business: Focus your attention on how the cloud will enable business growth or how strategy is aligned with the organizational purpose. Businesses often tend to worry about technical issues, get bogged down in complex IT landscapes, or suffer disproportionately trying to protect applications and data from growing cyber threats. Reality is that all of these situations can be delegated to a technology partner’s expert hands.

3. Keep it simple: Certainly, hybrid and multi-cloud environments offer unlimited flexibility levels, opening the door to new management and governance challenges, though. This is why, having solutions with a single point of monitoring and control of the entire architecture is essential. Businesses need the agility of public cloud as well as the security and control of private cloud in a single, integrated solution to give you the freedom to build, evaluate, and run applications where necessary, with utmost performance and cost control.

4. A solution to every need: There are different cloud providers with diverse proposals. There is always one that best fits a specific company’s requirements. We need to bet on flexible contracts, since they will allow you to choose the best alternative at all times, and even change dynamically if the business so requires. Accordingly, the presence of a technology partner capable of managing these bonds becomes important again.

5. Metrics and improvements. Workload migration to the cloud is barely the first step in a continuous improvement process. With the right metrics, based on analytical tools, artificial intelligence and big data, companies can bet to optimize performance, costs, or usability of their cloud solutions.

Hybrid cloud brings significant advantages for organizations.  To benefit from them, in Cirion we provide a set of solutions for cloud migration in a safe manner, with top performance and best security, scalability and connectivity levels.

Author:
Gabriel del Campo

VP Data Center, Cloud & Security
Cirion Technologies

According to different studies, data centers consume approximately 2% of the electricity produced worldwide.  The evolution of new technologies, digital transformation progress and the exponential growth in use of data and apps. could increase that figure by 4-fold globally by 2030. This increase could be higher in Latin America, which is slightly behind in its growth curve. 

Global data centers with high-availability levels, wide coverage and efficient use of energy represent an unprecedented opportunity for economic and technological development. 

Companies in this industry need to take some immediate action. The development of responsible practices through the deployment of ESG strategies (acronym in English for environmental, social and corporate governance actions) is the first step to ensure a sustainable outlook in the mid run, clear goals to reduce carbon footprint, and the necessary metrics to confirm that you are on the right pathway. 

These initiatives must encompass both construction of new data centers, and management, operation and delivery of existing services.  Among the best practices to reduce consumption we have solid-state drive technologies, way more efficient; archive to avoid having online information, which is not accessed frequently; virtualization of anything we can, and data deduplication to gain efficiency in backup and storage operations. 

On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence is getting to new data-based decision-making levels to optimize the need for servers that are on, or workload distribution. 

Efficient from the ground up

From the new data centers standpoint, it is essential to think about efficient architectures and technologies from scratch. The fact that data are increasingly distributed drives the adoption of edge type infrastructures, which must be installed away from big cities.  Data centers increase their capillarity and coverage.  Therefore, a careful choice of the site where it will be installed matters, ensuring there will be energy available for its development, emphasizing the availability of clean or renewable energy. 

Latin American countries are beginning to assess the inclusion of renewables in their energy matrices. However, more limited but equally high-impact measures can be taken today. For example, incorporation of solar energy for intermediate network transmission nodes, which because of their lower consumption, can be supplied this way. In any case, industry is expectant on the advancement of new renewable technologies, such as green hydrogen. Without a doubt, as soon as it reaches an adequate maturity level, it will be appropriately deployed to feed data centers. 

Another characteristic point in the region, which calls for a regulatory evolution is that, in general and apart from some specific exceptions, there is a single energy supplier for each geographical region. This means that industry players are not able to access to electricity providers redundancy, although they do have access to connections with different substations from the same provider. This represents an additional challenge in terms of design, construction, operation, and development of contingency plans to ensure high availability. 

In order to think about a future of highly sustainable data centers, the free energy market must be promoted in each of our countries in tandem with a greater drive for renewable energies. To that end, a joint and collaborative work is essential, engaging authorities of the different countries involved; utilities, and of course the companies that are part of this industry. Again, according to the definition of synergy, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In companies’ digital transformation processes, the cloud is a very important tool, as it allows them to be adaptable, scalable, and resilient. 

According to the IDC study FutureScape: Global IT Industry 2002 – Forecasts and Implications in Latin America, it is estimated that by 2023, 80% of companies will use cloud-related services.  This growth is leveraged by the interest companies have developed around cloud utility to handle large volumes of data and manage applications that are critical to the business.  

Considering the increasing demand for data generation, cloud applications, and companies’ current demands, Felipe Gómez, Director of Data Center, Security and Cloud at Cirion Technologies for the Andean region, shares some basic concepts about the cloud, its features and the advantages offered to companies according to their needs.   

The cloud is an enormous network of global connected remote servers working as a single ecosystem.  It enables data storage and management, as well as the execution of applications and delivering content or services (email, social networks, streaming, etc.). This means that users can access this data, information and services from any device with an internet access.   

“Deciding to use the cloud gives companies greater agility, security, and dynamism in their operations.   There are three options for implementing cloud usage in corporate management: the public cloud, the private cloud, and the hybrid cloud”, adds Gómez.  

Public cloud, the fastest 

Selecting a public, private or hybrid cloud is determined according to the company’s needs and forecasts. 

Public clouds are the most common type of implementation of cloud computing; the web features (such as servers or storage) belong to a service provider, which manages and offers them through the Internet.   AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft- Azure, and Google Cloud are a few examples of public cloud providers.   

One of the main advantages of the public cloud is its ability to scale quickly, enabling a faster implementation of environments.   The costs depend on the type of servers or peripherals required.  

Private cloud: greater security and availability, and lower latency 

This type of cloud offers a greater level of security and control than those of the public cloud because the services offered aren’t always shared and remain available to the user through an internal private network hosted in a local environment.   The private cloud is closer to the end customers’ applications and gives them the capacity to obtain lower latency and better performance.   The private cloud will always be an alternative for its stable costs in relation to the contract period. 

It is ideal to access applications’ services such as SAP or application virtualization, call center platforms or unified communications.   

Many companies also feel more comfortable with a private cloud, as they have local support in Spanish, which represents an important differential for many IT Directors.  

For most, the future is hybrid 

The adoption of cloud solutions brings organizations closer to the latest digital technologies and facilitates the development of innovative projects to achieve business objectives. 

To have a proprietary technological structure or just a private cloud, or to migrate the entire business to the public cloud are options that are becoming increasingly less contemplated by companies.  Operating with a mix of both clouds (public and private) will be the alternative adopted in the coming years; this is called hybrid cloud, clarifies Gómez. 

Many organization decided to have their productive environments in private clouds and their development environments in public clouds, because this type of scheme can offer greater security and speed and lower latency for critical applications. 

The IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex and companies must look for a scalable data management solution in order to remain afloat.   This type of data management in the cloud has become the solution of choice for many companies.   This is because companies are broadly adopting the cloud (public, private or hybrid) because it offers cost-savings, data availability, flexibility, scalability and many other advantages.  

According to the study “Cloud Computing Survey 2022”, almost three fourths (72%) of those responsible for IT decision making say that their organization is adopting cloud-based services when acquiring new technical capabilities.  

Information security is a priority for companies 

Any cloud migration process requires a decision from management, but also employee training and the support of experts to achieve an appropriate security governance.  

Whatever the choice for companies, when this task is trusted to specialists, they can obtain a correct scaling of needs and an efficient migration.   Cirion Technologies centers its efforts in offering companies a solution that can be adjusted to their expectations and guarantee increased security when managing business-critical information.  

Almost taken from a sci-fi movie, corporate technology has begun implementing what is known as a new generation of mobile computing centers, tools that will continue to change societies, and that represent one of the keys for digital cities development.  

Let’s start from the beginning. What are these new Edge Data Centers, and what are they for?

These new tools provide the same computing resources found in traditional data centers supported in large infrastructures.  However, this new type of Data Centers are usually called edge, since they are installed in the field where data processing, analytics, and real-time action/decision making are needed; thus avoiding sending digital data to the large traditional data centers, which are usually quite far from the place where end-user devices generate information.

With these systems, edge data centers can deliver cached content and cloud computing resources to any mobile device in real time. The concept works off traditional computing since we are now looking at a distributed IT architecture where client data is processed as close to the originating source as possible. 

Since Edge data centers are smaller and positioned closer to end users, their advantage lies on providing faster services with minimal latency, because they are processed at the same time of capture, thus sparing “data journey” to large data centers to obtain computing capabilities that translate into immediate action, e.g., on consumers on a given geographical location.

Another feature is that less time sensitive (delay) data can be sent to traditional large data centers -fixed infrastructure and facilities-, for historical analysis, big data, and long-term storage.

The so-called edge data centers must be easy to deploy and remove, designed to respond to temporary needs and actions, and much smaller than a shipping container.

The million-dollar question; will Edge data centers replace large, facility-based, traditional data centers? The answer is no because they perform contrasting functions.

The first one (perimeter or edge) comes to tackle and meet extremely specific computing needs, in a limited time and place. While the latter are a kind of “mother ship” and will continue to be the basic infrastructure with the greatest storage and computing capacity for digital data, and with the highest physical and digital security standards. 

Future is around the corner

Further to the pandemic’s impact in the region, today we can assure as a fact that digital information consumption has increased exponentially in Latin America, and that more data is required, something that impacts the Edge.

According to a report by Americas Market Intelligence ^[1](AMI) digital information consumption has done nothing but grow.  For example, with a 73% average internet penetration Latin America is heading to a digital zenith, with Argentina leading internet penetration in the region.  But, without a doubt, Brazil is the market of greatest interest, due to its population and geographic size.

Then, if we consider that Edge infrastructure investment go hand in hand with appropriate communications networks and that 5G deployment requires more distributed points of presence to distribute content, Edge Data Centers will soon play a significant role.

Edge Data Centers can help implementing a series of changes that will shape several transformations in our societies. For example:

1- 5G: Where a decentralized cell network made of edge data centers can help provide low latency for 5G in use cases with high device density.

2- Telecommunication companies: With cell-tower edge data centers, telecom companies can get better proximity to end users by connecting mobile phones and wireless sensors.

3- Internet of Things: Edge data centers can be used for data generated by IoT devices.  An edge data center would be used if data generated by devices needs more processing.

4-Healthcare. Some medical equipment, such as those used for robotic surgeries, would require extremely low latency and network consistency, of which, edge data centers can provide.

5-Autonomous vehicles. Edge data centers can be used to help collect, process, and share data between vehicles and other networks, which also relies on low latency.

6-Smart factories. Useful for machine predictive maintenance, as well as predictive quality management. It can also be used for efficiency regarding robotics used within inventory management.

Gartner^[2] predicts that 75% of corporate data will be created and processed in Edge by 2025. So, we are facing a scenario where this technological trend will create an exponential growth of Edge Data Centers region and worldwide.  Will we be ready?

^[1] https://americasmi.com/insights/consumo-de-medios-en-america-latina-cambios-marketing-publicidad-digital/

^[2] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/what-edge-computing-means-for-infrastructure-and-operations-leaders

Author:
Pablo García
Senior Sales Support Manager – Data Center & Security
Cirion Technologies Chile