Digital infrastructure is increasingly moving into Hybrid IT architectures to better support business and global connectivity requirements because of the ever-changing data, control, and networking demands of global enterprises. Through flexible, customizable services, these types of data-centric architectures can support the exploding volume of data available, the interactive traffic of digital business workflows, and the need for seamless connection between legacy infrastructure and emerging systems and networks.
As the world’s largest provider of carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions, Digital Realty has been a long-time champion of open, Hybrid IT architectures, helping our customers find new ways to extract value from a more interconnected global community. We developed our manifesto last year, Enabling Connected Data Communities, which offers a solutions-based approach and call to action to remove legacy system barriers across the interconnection industry by tackling rising challenges around Data Gravity. At the heart of this mission sits a collaborative roadmap for integrating digital platforms with multiple partners and building the industry’s largest open fabric-of-fabrics to connect different data centers and digital services.
Global companies like Verizon, Adobe, LinkedIn, and AWS trust our multi-tenant data center platform, PlatformDIGITAL¨, because it creates an ecosystem of networks, enterprises, content providers, and cloud and IT providers that can offer optimized network performance, enhanced security and scalability, and the ability to deploy, connect, and host critical data infrastructure. Our partners are always growing, but to date PlatformDIGITAL¨ includes over 1,500 enterprises, 1,200 network service providers, and 1,100 cloud and IT providers.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty, where he oversees both internal and customer-facing technology strategy and programs. In his role as CTO, he guides the business’ approach to managing the endless possibilities of technologies—including everything from AI and quantum computing to future advancements that are yet to arise—and helps customers and investors understand and leverage the full potential of these technologies.
Before his current role, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities to enable next-generation, high-performance exchange and interconnection solutions to facilitate broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a global basis.
Previously, Sharp held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest Communications, MCI / Verizon Business, and Reliance Globalcom.
