Outside the technology industry – and having a significant impact on it – most markets are talking about delivering excellence when it comes to digital “customer experiences”. Breaking down that very general term, customer experience is a comprised mixture of sorts – a polished and familiar GUI, an outcome-focused service that gives users what they want in just a few steps, and also an application that’s fast and responsive for its users.
Of course, there’s a good deal more going on in the background, and much of it outside the digital domain: from an outstanding application or service concept, to good quality customer service personnel, down to the commitment to communication with end-users. Now, for those tasked with ensuring the delivery of a world-class digital portion of the customer experience, there are a few basics to consider.
The distributed cloud
Every application comprises multiple parts; this includes databases, API gateways, core compute clusters, validation checkers — here, the list gets pretty long. These services are typically distributed across multiple cloud resources or are a hybrid mix of on-premises, multiple public clouds, and/or local, edge-based delivery.
It’s that final aspect that has a significant impact on how apps, websites, and services of all colors are delivered to the end-users. Most companies don’t want to centralize services because responsiveness and latencies can vary so much according to factors outside organizations’ direct control — jeopardizing that customer experience.
Consequently, companies in APAC, the Americas, and Australia seek to address local delivery of services by deploying resources via a data center colocation (co-lo, for short) in Europe. The first locations that spring to IT teams’ minds unfortunately also tend to be the expensive ones: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and the like. Ask any local in any of those cities how much they paid for their shoebox-sized apartment, and you should get some idea of the cost of co-lo in the same areas. The same choices usually come with electricity prices (and a carbon deficit) that are equally as sky-high.
The Nordic advantage
This article, and another to follow, is looking at the advantages of co-lo facilities in one of the most northern European countries: Sweden. It’s a country that’s blessed with many fine points of culture and tradition and some natural resources that just aren’t found almost anywhere else. For data-centric types, one outcome alone will interest: Sweden offers one of the greenest and lowest per-Watt electricity prices in Europe.
Source: www.electricitymap.org as of Nov 11 -2020
Regardless of price and the renewable nature of the power resources on tap, the go-to city of choice for companies seeking a DC in northern Europe is usually Stockholm. They choose the Swedish capital because of its proximity to backbone-capacity connections both across Europe and under the Atlantic, heading west and east via the “mainland” continent. Like Stockholm, Conapto is the favored provider of co-lo for many: it has the longest-standing position in the data center space (20+ years), considerable investment funding, and facilities that are purpose-built for secure and sustainable data center colocation.
There is a good deal to be written about Sweden’s and Conapto’s ecological credentials, an area that we will cover in the next article, but from purely technical points of view, the two Conapto co-facilities in north and southern Stockholm are impressive — they offer the fastest pairing facilities in northern Europe, so their users can easily access large-pipe VLANs to Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud, and many more.
Giving experiences the edge
The team at Conapto have always had a progressive mindset regarding flexible business models, quality assurance and simplicity in offering facilities to their co-lo clients. Redundancy between the two sites is a given (although a relatively unique aspect of Conapto), and the company boasts a 20-year stretch of 100% up-time on power and cooling for its 100% renewable-powered data centers.
There are no cripplingly long-term contracts to consider, and unlike the household name public clouds, there’s no lock-in by proxy due to ridiculous data exit costs. Scalability (both up and down) is how Conapto likes to attract new clients for its co-location, and there’s complete pricing visibility, up-front, even for complex tailor-made solutions.
The winners in all this are, of course, the users of the internet apps and services who benefit from the local, low-latency, fewest-hop facilities right on their doorsteps (in internet terms, that is). Providing immediacy and responsiveness via Conapto and its choice of peering partners gives companies and their end-users the type of experiences that data centers on distant shores cannot offer.
Keep watching these pages for a deeper dive into the Swedish provider’s options, and we will also look at the tax implications and CSR benefits of this low-carbon, cost-effective choice. Or if you’d like to learn a little more — either operationally or technically — multilingual operators are standing by to speak to you.
