Andrew Green, Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Digital Realty
November 29, 2022

With a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $1.85 trillion, the state of New York dominates the world stage in both economy and business. New York City itself is the third largest economy in the U.S., with a renowned financial center that hosts Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and 45 Fortune 500 companies.

The worldwide digital transformation, defined by increased cloud connectivity and hybrid IT environments, has transformed the NYC business community. The interconnection of businesses within this Northeast hub and their reliance on data-heavy technology call for a new approach to IT infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of the digital economy.

Tech Titans Take on The Big Apple

The key drivers of the substantial economy have historically been the financial, media, real estate, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors. However, sustained Big Tech investment has made New York a significant tech hub — an “East Coast rival to Silicon Valley” — giving rise to thousands of start-ups and surpassing both Texas and California in terms of employer demand for tech talent.

Between June and July 2022, New York registered the highest month-on-month increase countrywide in the number of tech job postings.

When things happen in the tech world, they happen fast. In 2018, Google pledged to double its NYC workforce and has since added 1.7 million square feet of office space as part of a corporate campus in Manhattan. By March 2020, Amazon acquired more than 2 million square feet of office space and warehouses across Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx. In August 2020, Facebook leased 730,000 square feet on Manhattan’s west side. During the same period, Apple signed a lease for 220,000 square feet near Madison Square Garden.

These major developments have undeniable benefits to this already thriving local economy, but not without costs.

Increased Data Gravity Takes Its Toll

There is ample evidence that the volume of enterprise data being created and processed is growing exponentially worldwide. As a hub for economic and technological growth, this explosion in data gravity — a snowball effect of increasing data requiring increasing quantities of applications, systems, and services required to store that data — has serious implications in NYC. When data volumes grow exponentially, the data mass becomes too unwieldy and expensive to move between enterprise storage systems and processing or analytical services.

Major Findings from Digital Realty’s 2022 Global Data Insights Survey

By 2024, over 70% of organizations will deploy multiple data hubs to drive mission-critical data analytics, sharing, and governance initiatives.
62% of companies with $1B+ revenues have 50+ locations or co-location sites.
Data location strategy is a top priority for large, multinational enterprises.
Digital Realty’s Data Gravity Index™ measures the intensity of data gravity across more than 50 metros and 23 industries globally. The Data Gravity Intensity score, as measured in gigabytes per second, provides a relative proxy for measuring data creation, aggregation, and processing.

Digital Realty’s Data Gravity Index predicts a global compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 139% globally and 132% for NYC through 2024.

As more and more data is created and processed across organizational locations, it becomes increasingly difficult for the enterprise to manage.

A Light at the End of the Tunnel for the City That Never Sleeps

The antidote to data gravity is a data-centric architecture that consolidates enterprise data in a single system and brings applications and processing power to the data instead. Creating a data-centric architecture enables real-time intelligence that optimizes data exchange between customers, partners, and employees across all channels. It also addresses the workflow, security, and cost concerns associated with data gravity.

Data-Centric Architecture for New York City with Digital Reality

Digital Realty offers modern solutions for businesses struggling to manage massive data volumes.

PlatformDIGITAL® delivers robust, interconnected data communities within multi-tenant data centers. Based on a Pervasive Data Center Architecture (PDx™), PlatformDIGITAL provides companies with global coverage, capacity, and connectivity, and enables them to link seamlessly with cloud and content providers and to share data between users across channels and geographic locations.

Designed specifically for businesses migrating to hybrid IT and data-centric architectures, ServiceFabric Connect™ works together with PlatformDIGITAL to connect legacy infrastructure with emerging business applications and networks on a single interface. The result? Seamless interconnection between workflow participants, applications, multiple clouds, and ecosystems.

With ServiceFabric Connect, organizations can create centers of data exchange and scale digital business. Specific benefits include:

Simple and rapid provisioning of any-to-any connectivity at any time through one port
Integrated security through network segmentation and private connections that bypass the public Internet
On-demand bandwidth that can be scaled up or down based on business needs
Flexible billing with no long-term commitments

Accessing a Data-Centric Architecture in New York & New Jersey

Digital Realty operates an ecosystem of three data centers and a co-location hub in downtown New York. These facilities are directly connected to each other, and to our New Jersey data centers to provide seamless connectivity, low latency, and superior redundancy. That means small, medium, or enterprise businesses receive access to the same feature-rich applications and connectivity-rich platforms and can rapidly deploy with scalable and flexible design options. This coupled with 300 data centers globally across 6 continents, tethered together with our Service Fabric gives our customers the ability to overcome the challenges that stem from Data Gravity.

Check out Digital Realty’s data centers and co-location in New York and New Jersey.

Learn more about PlatformDIGITAL

Resisting the Pull of Data Gravity in New York City