Community is King: Cloudscene H1 2022 Rankings Demonstrate Digital Realty’s success

Connectivity is arguably the most important part of doing business in the 21st century. What was once a nice-to-have is now a need-to-have as technology and businesses have evolved. And in an increasingly hyper-connected digital world, enterprises need powerful, reliable networking infrastructure if they’re to avoid lost productivity and profitability. They need to be able to directly connect and tap into the services they need – be they cloud services, network services, content platforms or private or public data lakes– to get things done, quickly and efficiently.

Underpinning and enabling this connectivity are colocation data centers; home to the internet and the central nervous system of the global digital economy. However, as the dependency on digital services continues to grow, and customers expect better performance from data center and platform providers like us as a result, the connectivity stakes have never been higher.

Recently, Cloudscene, the leading market intelligence provider and independent global marketplace for network, cloud and colocation services, published its bi-annual leaderboard which ranks data center operators across North America, Latin America, EMEA, Asia and Oceania on several key factors:

• The density of their facilities within the region
• The total number of service providers within those facilities
• The total number of network fabrics within those facilities The total number of cloud on-ramps within those facilities.
  

We’re delighted to have made a strong showing across the globe, which includes the retention of our first-place position in EMEA. We are grateful to our customers, including the leading local, regional and global providers of cloud, network, content and managed services, for choosing our facilities to build and interconnect their points- of-presence to exchange, distribute and enrich their data. The latest Cloudscene leaderboard clearly demonstrates that our philosophy of openness and enabling our customers to drive value though collaboration is resonating with the industry.

According to Cloudscene’s rankings, our global facilities currently host 76 unique cloud-on-ramps, enabling customers to establish low-latency connections to the leading cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Alibaba and IBM Cloud. In addition, network and fabric providers have deployed approximately 6,000 service provider points-of-presence and 1,000 fabric points-of-presence on PlatformDIGITAL®, helping to address the challenges associated with Data Gravity and simplifying connectivity.

Last year, we laid out our vision plainly with our industry manifesto: a call to action to remove legacy barriers across the interconnection industry and tackle the challenges of Data Gravity¹; head on, leveraging PlatformDIGITAL, our global data center platform. Part of our DNA is to be the safe and open meeting place for all companies, technologies and data, of all shapes and sizes, from all types of industries, to come together: a trusted and protected place where businesses collaborate and innovate around data.

Since its launch in 2019, we’ve grown its global footprint to more than 290 data centers in 50 metros across 26 countries on six continents, giving our 4,000+ customers more deployment options than ever before. This aggressive expansion strategy has seen the introduction of many strategically important markets to our customers such as Barcelona, right at the heart of the most important subsea cable hub in the world; Israel in partnership with Mivne, putting the ‘ME’ in ‘EMEA’ for the first time and giving our customers an opportunity to scale and expand into the Middle East; as well as Nigeria with the acquisition of Medallion Data Centers, an emerging connectivity powerhouse.

Next to this, we are innovating heavily in the technology solutions department. Recently, at our global flagship event MarketplaceLIVE, we announced the market introduction of ServiceFabric™ Connect, the first service delivered by our newly developed global service orchestration platform ServiceFabric™. With ServiceFabric, we’re enabling our customers to easily provision global connectivity and coordinate connected services across our entire portfolio, helping them to fulfil their technology needs and support their business goals.

Over the next decade, the potential value of digitalization to society and industries at large is expected to reach $100 trillion2. We’re at a stage now where that value won’t be realized unless our digital architecture becomes more data-centric.

Connectivity is a key part of solving this challenge. And while our work doesn’t end here, Cloudscene’s latest rankings are a good reminder that we’ve made significant strides in the right direction in terms of customer-centricity, something we will continue to do for many years to come.

^{1. Data Gravity is the phenomenon which sees large volumes of data continually attracting more data, making it impossible to move, manipulate or extract value from}

^{2. https://www.weforum.org/press/2016/01/100-trillion-by-2025-the-digital-dividend-for-society-and-business/}