The Impacts of Data and Future Technologies on Data Center Site Selection

The Ins and Outs of Data Centers
I think one of the misconceptions about the data center business is that it’s a niche space. And the reality is it's become a very large industry and investment. And one of the things that we reference in talking to our clients is the fact that the five largest publicly traded data center companies are equal to the five largest office and industrial from a market cap perspective, which I think is surprising to many people. And I think [it’s] indicative of the growth of the industry over the last several years and what we think will continue to be a growth industry as we create more and more data, more and more interconnection, and [as] the need for security and distribution of that data becomes more and more critical.

So, what makes a facility mission critical? One of the things that is important when we visit with our clients is the level of security and/or redundancy, which varies by facility. Without getting too far into the weeds, there are certain aspects of our clients. The technology has to be very secure and it’s very regulated, and therefore security is paramount for them and in other cases, less so. Maybe distribution of some nonprivate content is more important to have low latency and be distributed to the edge for the client… We also consider easy access versus private, confidential healthcare or financial data.

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