Digital Realty is taking by the bull by the horns on what the San Francisco-based company sees as the industry’s transformation to a data-centric architecture. “The transition to the digital economy has rapidly picked up pace in the last year, remaking both public and private companies across all industries, transforming how they create and deliver value,” the company says.

At IDC, Courtney Munroe, research VP, worldwide telecoms research, said, “The accelerating shift to always-on digital business is creating new architectural challenges for both enterprises and service providers—from ever- increasing data volumes being created in multiple locations, regulatory and security concerns and a requirement to exchange data with new communities of business partners.

“Our industry research points to a growing need for this kind of combination of open interconnection and next-generation colocation that will reduce the complexity of digital transformation,” he continued.

Accordingly, Digital Realty has laid out a “manifesto” for transforming to a connected data community approach. It sounds out the key themes of the manifesto as follows:

DIGITAL ECONOMY. “The Digital Economy is remaking both private and public enterprises across all industries, transforming how they create and deliver value.”

REQUIRES A NEW BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE. “To succeed, companies need to operate ubiquitously and on-demand, augmented by real-time intelligence to best serve customers, partners and employees across all channels, business functions and multiple points of business presence.”

DATA GRAVITY IS THE OBSTACLE. “Data Gravity inhibits workflow performance, raises security concerns, and increases costs, all complicated by regulatory and legacy architecture constraints. With Data Gravity, the laws of physics and IT intersect to provide a proxy for a new age of business architectures that enterprises will be driven to adopt and service providers will be pressed to support.”

FORCES A SHIFT TO A DATA-CENTRIC ARCHITECTURE. “Data Gravity forces a shift to a data-centric architecture, where data is at the center of the architecture and integration is the challenge. Local copies of private, shared and public data sets need to be integrated as part of decentralized workflows which originate and traverse across multiple internal and external platforms, with the ability to support policy enforcement controls, real time analytics and interactive cross-platform orchestration.”

NEEDS A CONNECTED DATA COMMUNITY APPROACH. “This requires a new approach, one that moves beyond cross connects and traditional interconnection backhaul, giving way to an era of open, pervasively connected data communities colocated at centers of data.”