Italian Data Center Association Logo
Cos'è il Data Center home

What is a Data Center

The data centre is a critical infrastructure that can be defined as the technological heart of any business, as it ensures the constant operation of all IT equipment, systems, networks and services supporting the daily digital activities of the enterprise.

Cos'è un Data Center (1)

Historically, a data center was considered a static data bunker, a space where the necessary resources for processing an organization’s information were concentrated. Today we can affirm that the concept of a data center as such has evolved a lot. We call the data center the fundamental infrastructure that allows the advancement of the most sophisticated information processing and analysis tools, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning or the Internet of Things.

Infrastructure has shifted from traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that can support applications and workloads across multiple physical infrastructures and in a multicloud environment.Today, data is located and needs to be connected across multiple data centers, at the periphery, and in public and private clouds. The data center must be able to communicate with multiple locations, either within the enterprise or in the cloud. Even the public cloud can be viewed as a collection of data centers. When applications are hosted in the cloud, they use the data center resources provided by the cloud service provider.

Cos'è un Data Center (2)
Cos'è un Data Center (3)

As the volume of data produced multiplies, the need to create digital ecosystems grows.

Today we live in a global and digitized economy, in which companies operate internationally and need to share information privately, directly, securely and ultra-fast with agents located in all corners of the world. The volume of data has multiplied exponentially and the need to create ecosystems for shared access to information has become fundamental. And all this goes through a Data Center.

To this we must add that in the digital era in which we find ourselves immersed, information flows and data are present in our lives at all levels: to work, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, to buy, to access information… Huge amounts of data are generated that must be stored and, most importantly, must be accessible and have the ability to be shared with companies, partners, customers, and users around the world. Data storage, also known as colocationIt has undergone a profound development, in terms of the volume of data handled and the geographical footprint that its traffic capacity must cover, giving rise to what we now call digital transformation. It goes without saying that the place where this data is stored is a data center.

Cos'è un data center
IDA members