What is digital infrastructure?

How a flexible, secure and intelligent foundation can make the difference to your business

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What is digital infrastructure?

Digital infrastructure is the foundation of any connected business. It enables success, powers transformation and connects people around the world.

It includes connectivity, cloud, compute, security, storage, SaaS and PaaS applications and much more.

The growth in digital infrastructure is driven by cloud migration, the hybrid workplace, the automation of almost everything and the need to enable flexibility of service and capability on a global scale.

What does it enable for businesses?

Digital infrastructure enables the connected business to operate, grow, innovate and respond to customer demand. At a basic level, it’s the platform that connects them to customers and the outside world and, if done well, it is a significant opportunity for competitive differentiation.

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What is Colt's role in digital infrastructure?

Our vision is to be the digital infrastructure company that the world’s leading businesses choose to connect with. We understand the importance of connectivity and the impact it has on the overall user and customer experience. Without connectivity, there is no digital infrastructure.

About us

Choose the Colt experience

Despite a wealth of competition, customers continue to choose Colt and value our service more than any other carrier, with a Net Promotor Score (NPS) to prove it.

How does digital infrastructure relate to digital transformation?

Digital transformation cannot happen without digital infrastructure, as this is the basis for any connected technology. Previously businesses may have viewed things like cloud, storage and connectivity as separate items rather than as a whole. Taking a digital infrastructure view is a much more holistic approach and takes a view of infrastructure as a single entity. This means that things like agility, security and experience must be considered across the whole business, not just on a supplier-by-supplier basis.

What does good digital infrastructure look like?

Pre-digitalisation, changing or updating infrastructure was a slow and expensive process which involved installing hardware at physical sites. Then, if you wanted to change one component, it meant adapting other components that other partners managed, and the burden of orchestration fell to the internal team.

It was an inflexible approach that was hard to adapt, and there was a real risk that the business’s needs would have outgrown the planned infrastructure by the time it was ready to go live.

In contrast, the speed, flexibility and responsiveness of digital infrastructure stands out. An enterprise can identify a need and respond in near real-time, using automated orchestration and software defined networking to stand up seamlessly integrated capabilities in a matter of clicks. Today’s digital infrastructure is agile, scalable and cost-effective – and the control lies with the business rather than the infrastructure being a business inhibitor.

What business doesn’t want an on-demand ‘cloud like’ infrastructure experience at its fingertips?

Why is connectivity so critical?

The right connectivity can make or break your digital infrastructure – it needs to enable the flexibility and agility your business requires, with security built in to meet user demand. The network needs to be planned from day one to ensure the best experience for users and end customers.

Colt IQ Network

Connect to more data centres than any other provider

The Colt IQ Network is a 400Gbps optimised intelligent network distributed to 1000+ data centres and carrier hotels around the world, providing best in class service and optimised for SDN, NFV and cloud services.

What’s the future of digital infrastructure?

Digital infrastructure is continually evolving, driven by enterprise and end-user demand. The introduction of automation through APIs, AI-based intelligence and predictive fault monitoring, will help ensure that services remain live and problems are spotted well in advance.

There’s also scope for greater analysis, with heavy lifting taken care of by AI and machine learning, to provide greater insight into how people use their networks. This will also be used alongside the greater agility offered by automation to better manage resources and budgets.

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Colt Technology Services

Last updated: Feb 7, 2023     |     5 min read

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