Defying Data Gravity in Boston

Andrew Green, Vice President, Enterprise Solutions

March 8, 2022

It’s not difficult to understand why Boston is one of the country’s most exciting and innovative tech hubs. The capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the most populous city in New England and anchors the Greater Boston metropolitan region. With a population of 4.8 million, this metropolis is the tenth largest within the US, has the sixth largest economy, and is home both to leading companies in software, education, pharma and bio-tech, and to a thriving startup scene.

Boston’s rich history as the heart of American democracy has given rise through the generations to the city’s current commercial fabric. Today, Boston hosts some of the world’s most revered academic institutions and is a recognized center of excellence in higher education and scientific research, helping to propel the city into an equally illustrious future.

In a recent WalletHub study, Boston was ranked the sixth most educated city in the United States. And there is no shortage of opportunities for a highly educated population to get a good return on their educational investment.

Some of the many enterprise companies headquartered in and around Boston to draw from the region’s deep talent pool are Boston Scientific Corp., Fidelity Investments, IPG Photonics, Liberty Mutual, Gillette, State Street, and General Electric. GE for example sees a huge opportunity in software and services to support the industrial Internet of Things: a key reason for the company’s relocation to Boston’s Seaport District from Fairfield, CT was to tap into the area’s vibrant technology ecosystem.

As the country’s most convenient hopping off point for Europe, and with relatively lower housing costs than New York, Boston is a magnet for young graduates and entrepreneurs seeking to commercialize their research. Anchored by a resident community of venture capital and private equity firms, the city’s diverse start-up scene is spread across a variety of sectors including technology, fintech, health tech, ed-tech, manufacturing tech, food tech, and biotech —the latter of which Boston currently leads the world in startup activity.

There are nearly 50 Greater Boston start up accelerators, incubators, and similar support programs. In terms of VC funding received since 2013, the region shares third place with the Southeast.

While the concentration of data-driven multinational companies and high-tech startups is creating a wealth of new business opportunities across industries, the region faces significant challenges around data gravity.

Greater Boston Digital Ecosystem and the Challenges of Data Gravity

Business growth brings with it data growth. From a global perspective, the volume of data being created and processed is growing exponentially:

• IDG has revealed that data volumes are growing at an average of 63% per month.
• The World Economic Forum estimates that over 463 exabytes of data will be created every day by 2025.
• According to IDC, by 2025, 80% of data worldwide will reside in enterprises.

This explosion in data growth has serious implications. This is because as more and more data is created and processed across organizational locations, it becomes increasingly difficult for the enterprise to manage.

The term Data Gravity has been applied to this phenomenon — which is present in almost every major metro worldwide. Effectively, Data Gravity describes the process whereby the accumulation of data results in the parallel accumulation of applications, systems and services required to store and process that data. When data volumes grow exponentially, traditional data architectures simply cannot keep up with the proliferation.

With the data mass too unwieldy to be moved between data centers, cloud services and networks, data architectures need to evolve and become data-centric, bringing users, applications and networks to the data instead.

To learn more about Data Gravity, watch the video.

Digital Reality developed the Data Gravity Index™ to measure the intensity of Data Gravity across more than 50 metros and 23 industries globally. In each case, the Data Gravity Intensity score, as measured in gigabytes per second, provides a relative proxy for measuring data creation, aggregation and processing.

Data Gravity Intensity is expected to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 139% globally through 2024 as data stewardship drives global enterprises to increase their digital infrastructure capacity to aggregate, store and manage the majority of the world’s data.

Data-Centric Architecture Based on PlatformDIGITAL®

Data Gravity inhibits enterprise workflow performance, raises security concerns, and increases costs.

With direct connectivity via undersea cables to Europe, close proximity to major global internet exchanges, and SDN-enabled cloud on ramps, Digital Realty’s data-centric architecture addresses these concerns by creating robust, interconnected data communities. Now, enterprises can seamlessly link with cloud and content providers to share data between users across channels and geographic locations.

This is what Digital Reality’s customers get with PlatformDIGITAL®, the largest global data center platform designed with a Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx™) that removes data gravity barriers and supports distributed workflows providing global coverage, capacity and connectivity.

Accessing a Data-Centric Architecture in Boston

Digital Realty is Boston’s largest data center provider and operates a PlatformDIGITAL ecosystem of 3 multi-tenant facilities with about 40 MW of capacity. Conveniently situated well away from the downtown city center in Needham and Bedford, this connected campus offers secure and reliable colocation, and network, compliance, security, disaster recovery, and cloud services for complete hybrid IT support.

With dedicated connectivity from their private architecture, clients have direct access to:

• High power density
• Rich connectivity in a fiber-dense environment, meeting at 1 Summer Street
• Low-latency connections to major global internet exchanges
• Dependable local support 24x7

Click here to learn more about the connected Boston campus or schedule a tour today to see our facilities in person for a firsthand look at the future of digital infrastructure.