With the global pandemic, businesses went remote, and connectivity became a major issue. The demand for faster connectivity and reliable services was at an all-time high.

Enter Flexential with its people-centric approach and nationwide connectivity that promised to empower the IT journey of the most complex businesses. The offerings include integrated colocation with a data center space of three million square feet in 19 markets that are highly connected.

Data center space is undoubtedly evolving daily; Flexential has recognized three major trends impacting the data center arena. And plans to leverage these trends for their growth in the market. 

Talking about the trends, Flexential, Ryan Mallory, Chief Operating Officer, said, "The three major trends include – 

• An increasingly dispersed workforce, causing the need for widespread connectivity.

•  A multitude of new risks leads to a focus on disaster preparedness. 

• A focus on sustainability, drawing attention to environmentally conscious providers." 

Elaborating further on each of the trends, Ryan Mallory talking about the first trend, said that about 82% of urban areas have experienced a decline in residency as people are shifting from their more urban homes to their suburban homes. "This shift – accelerated by COVID-19 - has created an urgent demand for more widespread connectivity to support users' daily personal and professional life," informed Ryan Mallory.

Now, businesses are challenged to provide low-latency, high coverage access to Google Workspace, Microsoft Office 365, collaboration tools, video conferencing applications, and more within their corporate IT stacks to remain productive. 

Flexential is ready for the challenge, as Ryan Mallory mentioned. "Flexential recognizes this challenge and is expanding their data centers to rapidly growing Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities like Nashville, TN, and Denver, CO – with no intention of slowing down," revealed Ryan Mallory. 

Regarding the second trend, Ryan Mallory revealed that businesses have become more vulnerable than ever, and remote work has widened the threat landscape. Many forward-thinking leaders are now investing more time, energy, and dollars in disaster recovery (DR), data backups, and cybersecurity awareness. "Flexential supports this effort by offering customers access to a broad array of data and network security services with a security expert on the job 24/7. The security team offers upfront assessments, ongoing audits, simulated event tests, and regular reviews of security and disaster recovery plans to ensure that the company stays safe," said Ryan Mallory. 

The third trend focuses on sustainability with the attention drawn toward environmentally conscious providers; and sharing his views on this trend, Ryan Mallory said that in recent years, many leaders are requesting more ESG reporting transparency from their providers and better tools to operate sustainably. Interestingly, carbon emissions from cloud services will play a major role in purchasing by 2025. 

"Given this shift, we have recently taken monumental steps to design, build and maintain our data centers with the environment top of mind. In December, we tied our multi-billion-dollar investment directly with sustainability, issuing the green notes under our Green Finance Framework. Moving forward, all new data center projects supported through the Framework must demonstrate a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.4 or below, as well as zero water usage, to qualify for funding," informed Ryan Mallory.

Talking about the challenges faced by the Data Center Space, Ryan Mallory said, "Flexential recently collected extensive customer feedback from real-life deployments, aiming to help customers better scale their digital business during such a volatile time. From the feedback, Flexential created three new FlexAnywhere blueprints designed specifically to address the key pain points CIOs face in meeting ever-changing business challenges." 

These blueprints will provide the following to the customers: 

• Provide Agility and Ability to Scale IT Infrastructure: To meet business requirements, services, tools, and new business initiatives, with the ability to rapidly scale up or down resources, infrastructure, and data center footprints according to demand.

• Improve Application Performance and Reliability: To meet higher SLAs, application and network availability requirements, and provide CIO-level visibility into critical infrastructure.

• Deliver Superior Network Performance and Interconnection: To improve response times and create a predictable performance for distributed users, provide secure and reliable connectivity to core data centers, and improve network reliability to customers' cloud providers and business partners.

"With a tagline – Interconnected Data Centers and Hybrid Cloud IT Solutions –Flexential strives to empower its customers' IT journeys via an end-to-end human experience. Utilizing its 38 data centers across 19 markets, Flexential delivers tailored, effective hybrid IT solutions," said Ryan Mallory when asked to throw light on their brand statement. 

Ryan Mallory added that with Flexential, customers could access various offerings, including colocation, cloud, disaster recovery, data protection, connectivity, and professional services.

Flexential, with its sophisticated interconnection, allows customers to:

● Adjust their IT infrastructure

● Integrate new technologies easily

● Elastically conform capacity for effective digital ecosystem management

In a nutshell, Flexential leverages a consultative approach and comprehensive solutions and gives technology leaders an arsenal of strategic paths to uplevel their organization.

Citing the case studies where Flexential has enabled clients to overcome their hurdles and achieve the desired outcomes with their innovative range of solutions, Ryan Mallory talked about the recent study of GrayRobinson. GrayRobinson – a nationally recognized law firm –could not offer the level of reliability and sustainability needed to operate its business at the optimal level. 

Flexential entered and, with its colocation environment, delivered disaster recovery services. Flexential implemented a DR strategy that used Flexential's flexible, reliable DRaaS solution tailored to meet GrayRobinson's unique replication and recovery needs. Flexential housed GrayRobinson's data in a facility built to endure a Category 5 hurricane. And with that in place, GrayRobinson substantially decreased its footprint with regard to leased space and has lowered its overall carbon footprint by a large margin.

Talking about the market competition, Ryan Mallory said, "Flexential is a customer-first business in every sense of the phrase. We are tirelessly committed to staying in the know on the latest IT trends and keeping open conversations with our customer base to ensure we're offering effective purpose-built products. As companies are getting their footing after COVID-fueled challenges, Flexential is helping customers reimagine what it takes to meet the needs of their teams and their end-users. We put our customers and their wants above all else, which is something many organizations can't claim today."

As far as the future is concerned, Flexential is on the road of continuous acceleration and the need for more capacity to maintain its pace with the digital age.