DINT #62 - A Love Letter to Digital Infrastructure

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This issue includes a free preview for our unpaid subscribers. Paid subscribers have access to the entire article below. Enjoy! - L

But first, today’s headlines:

Despite U.S.-Led Trade Embargo Taiwan’s Acer Still Ships to Russia
(Reuters / Filipp Lebedev and Gleb Stolyarov)

Meta Plans to Poster AI Across Its Metaverse and All Other Platforms
(Axios / Ina Fried)

Google to Include In-Office Attendance in Performance Reviews
(CNBC / Jennifer Elias)

Cybersecurity Vendor Throws Up Hands, Tells Customers to Replace Infected Hardware
(Krebs on Security / Brian Krebs)

Astronaut and Tech Company Founder Aisha Bowe Nabs $947M Gov Consulting Contract
(POCIT / Samara Linton)

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Feature Article

Some wonder why my newsletter is called Digital Infrastructure News and Trends. That’s easy. I’m in love with the industry and believe it holds great potential for the future of human development.

Major technologies flow out of digital infrastructure and without a strong one, we’re no longer connected globally. Here’s what I mean. Look at the latest innovations in technology in the past 30 years:

·         Internet – gained widespread use in 1995

·         Email – took off in the mid 2000s

·         3G/4G/5G – 2001

·         Broadband - 2007

·         Fiber optics – 1996

None of these would be possible without digital infrastructure. Yet few people know about this powerful sector of our world. Until I began working in the industry, I didn’t know data centers were as complex as they currently are.

What is digital infrastructure actually?

If you’re a pro in this space, please excuse the simplicity of the question but it’s important to have a foundation of understanding. One person’s digital infrastructure may not be another’s.

The Sustainable Infrastructure Alliance defines digital infrastructure as:

 The total physical and software-based infrastructure necessary to deliver digital goods, products & services. This includes data centers, fiber infrastructure, server hardware, personnel, IT virtualization & infrastructure software, operating systems, etc.

A leader in the digital infrastructure space, Equinix, sees digital infrastructure through the lens of business-to-business operations. It defines digital infrastructure as:

Digital infrastructure brings together and interconnects physical and virtual technologies such as compute, storage, network, applications, and Everything as a Service (XaaS) platforms to build the foundation for a company’s digital operations.

Vendor Simplicable defines digital infrastructure this way:

Foundational services that are necessary to the information technology capabilities of a nation, region, city, or organization.

A few examples of digital infrastructure

Data Centers – buildings designed for optimal operation of servers, network equipment, and connectivity resources that ensure uptime/continuity. This is why outages are such big news. When a data center goes down, there’s no way for operations to continue. Our world is dependent on connectivity now. There’s no going back.