One of the things 2020 highlighted is how pervasive technology is in our day to day lives.
According to the IEA, “global internet traffic surged by almost 40% between February and mid-April 2020, driven by growth in video streaming, video conferencing, online gaming, and social networking. This growth comes on top of rising demand for digital services over the past decade: since 2010, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled while global internet traffic has grown 12-fold.”
What the rest of the world quickly learned thanks to instant shifts to working from home and online learning, those of us in the industry have known about the relentless march of compute consumption for a while now.
Personally, I like to think of it more as a march to convenience. One night before dinner a few weeks ago I needed to swap number plates and change out the insurance on one of my vehicles. I logged on to the DVLA website and within 10 minutes my task was complete. We are so accustomed to filling out a form online that we don’t even think about the fact that something like this would have been done with paper by a clerk not that long ago, particularly for a government agency like DVLA. We take the convenience for granted.
What does this growing compute demand mean for Kao Data? Simply put the growth of data - and more importantly the growth in artificial intelligence and high performance computing (HPC) - elevates the requirements for mission critical infrastructure. We make it our priority to be close to the most innovative, agile leading edge computing technology businesses in the world. As a result, we run at a pace, build to a standard and operate to a level that can house the technology our customers require so they, in turn, can get the most out of their HPC workloads.
For 2021, we see tremendous growth across the company, our campus and the Kao Data brand. My purpose is to ensure we have the right team in the right place at the right time. With my arrival, our brilliant COO, Paul Finch can really focus on the next stage of our Harlow campus build strategy - a campus which this week was ranked in the Top 10 science and research parks in the East of England region.
Our world class team is also further expanding - including the additions of James Lewis and Jonathan Keane - to ensure we have a solid foundation to deliver on our vision of becoming the UK’s world-class home for high performance colocation.
We are growing services and partnerships, both within industries and at a regional and global scale. Our commitment to sustainability is strengthening as we aggressively move to reduce and reverse our carbon footprint. Last, but certainly not least, we are maintaining a laser focus on our customer service focused ethos as our customer relationships deepen and expand.
How will we do this? By scaling with quality and care. Our responsibility to our customers goes far and beyond providing space and power or satisfying SLA requirements. We understand the criticality of what we provide to their business. Life science organisations need to focus on vaccine developments. Financial services companies need to mitigate risk to keep global economies moving. Meteorological organisations need to track weather patterns in the light of changing climate patterns. All of these require a dedicated focus on the task at hand and not on the infrastructure of the data centre.
At Kao Data we are ready and willing to step up to the challenges our customers present. We know our technical foundations are strong and the commitment from our team to help our customers is even stronger. This next year offers an exciting opportunity for our company. We hope you’ll join us along the way.
Interested in Kao Data? Feel free to connect on LinkedIn, or drop me a line at: lee.myall@kaodata.com
Lee Myall
Lee Myall is the former CEO at Kao Data and has spent more than 20 years leading teams that design, develop and deliver mission-critical digital infrastructure.