Like the universe, the Internet of Things (IoT) is expanding every day. By 2025, an estimated 22 billion devices are connected to the internet. All these new devices, sensors, and computers will generate, process, and share massive amounts of data. This vast amount of IoT data requires rapid processing and enormous storage and hosting. Edge data centers are a critical backbone of infrastructure that will help support the IoT revolution. Data pools are becoming data lakes and oceans, and data centers will need to process, analyze, and store all IoT sensor data.
What is web hosting?
Using colocation is somewhat like renting an apartment to access your data. Colocation facilities lease space, power, cooling, network solutions, and security to multiple clients simultaneously, with each client bringing their own "furniture," such as IT equipment and servers. Over the past decade, colocation has evolved from a convenient option allowing companies to store data off-site before committing to investing in their own data centers to a more robust and advantageous on-premises data center solution. The surge in colocation facilities is a powerful driver of the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) because it offers reliable uptime, low-latency connectivity, cloud access to multi-cloud environments, and on-demand scaling.
Hosting enables tighter connections.
In many IoT applications, speed is critical, and rapid data transmission depends on two main factors:
1. Bandwidth between IoT devices and networks.
2. The proximity of the device to the network.
Take self-driving cars as an example. In San Francisco, several driverless car companies have moved to hosting services to test their technology on the city's central streets. The flow of IoT data could rapidly grow into a deluge, with millions of sensors and real-time processing requirements in each vehicle.
In nearby Sunnyvale, a hosted data center acts as a high-volume hub for sensor data from self-driving cars, which can be securely processed to inform the control of all other self-driving cars in the same area. IoT sensors utilize GPS, vector graphics, and maps to capture speed and orientation data, as these and many other data points influence the self-driving car's decisions. Each of these deterministic processes must be reviewed, analyzed, and processed by software—all in real time, with the vehicles reporting back to the data center.
Imagine a day when self-driving cars are ubiquitous on roads everywhere. In this scenario, they would need to access data centers with tightly connected and high-throughput circuitry to process all the data they generate. After all, driving requires instantaneous decisions, which translates to extremely low data transmission latency. Widely distributed hosting data centers allow autonomous vehicles to maintain rapid and close connectivity with other relevant IoT devices within a geographic area, much like a mobile phone connects to a nearby cell tower while driving.
5G network speed improvement
While proximity increases the speed of IoT data sharing, the advent of 5G communication networks makes the speed equation even more important. The fastest 5G networks are expected to transmit data at least 10 times faster than 4G LTE. Some experts believe that 5G could operate up to 100 times faster. Many IoT devices connect directly to the public cloud, sending their sensor data there and receiving communications. But problems arise when so many devices—potentially tens of billions in just a few years—are transmitting data over ultra-fast 5G networks. Data congestion can slow IoT connections to a snail's pace, much like a traffic jam on a multi-lane highway.
Hybrid computing drives IoT data
Researchers have explored the benefits of moving cloud connectivity closer to the ground where IoT devices are located. Critical, speed-critical data processing occurs near the device or in a nearby data center, with subsequent data flowing directly to the cloud or via a hosted direct cloud connection (if necessary). This hybrid computing process is often referred to as fog or edge computing.
Colocation data centers facilitate fog computing by providing ample low-cost space, secure protection for IoT data, and an additional layer of connectivity to the cloud. Because colocation customers run their own hardware within remote data centers, they have complete control over the privacy of their IoT device networks and development/testing environments. IoT devices directly connected to public cloud infrastructure face concerning security vulnerabilities, leading security experts to recommend restricting access to IoT devices to private networks. In smart homes, if light bulbs, refrigerators, and thermostats are all connected via a public cloud, it's akin to leaving the front door unlocked in terms of ease of hacking.
Preparing for the rapid growth of the Internet of Things
With the rapid growth of IoT devices, the need to quickly expand data infrastructure to accommodate greater capacity is increasing. As the number of connected devices and their key functions become a larger part of our business and lifestyles, companies deploying IoT technologies will become more profitable, but they also risk becoming victims of their own success if they fail to respond quickly to growth.
Colocation offers advantages in speed and security for the Internet of Things (IoT), and it also enables rapid scaling of IoT data networks by allocating more bandwidth, power, and space in a very short time. Market forecasters predict that the colocation data center market will grow exponentially by more than 7% annually over the next five years, reaching nearly $50 billion by 2027. Driving this growth is the ever-expanding world of IoT. The more we interconnect with IoT devices and with the world around us, the more we need hosting capacity to handle all the data that forms the basis of all IoT interactions.
