Today’s society navigates in a sea of data and information. From the moment the sun rises, most of the population is unaware that it is communicating in real time with a server hosted in a Data Center, which is part of a network capable of storing and interconnecting large volumes of information.
Whether it’s the time reflected on your smart speaker, the digital alarm clock, the first news of the day appearing in your cell phone notifications or the trending song on Spotify, everything goes through a Data Center.
To get an idea of the immense amount of information managed by these infrastructures, we can compare it to the size it would occupy in a movie format. One zettabyte is equivalent to approximately 22 trillion high-definition movies. To put this figure in context, according to a report by the consulting firm IDC, the volume of data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, which is 175 times the amount of information generated in 2011.
Data centers are, therefore, a very important infrastructure for society, housing and sustaining the Internet network as we know it. Without them, our daily lives would be very different.
Diary of a digital citizen
Given the context, in this article we will take a look at all the occasions throughout the day in which we consciously or unconsciously connect to a Data Center to obtain information that we then manage and process from our smart devices.
Connected from early morning
As soon as we wake up, many of us already make use of a Data Center. After deactivating the alarm on our cell phones, we open our social network profiles, check the latest messages on platforms such as Whatsapp, which currently sends more than 100 billion messages a day worldwide, check the first emails of the morning or even listen to a podcast while having breakfast
Then we use this network again when we check the news in an online newspaper, or listen to streaming music while waiting for the next train on the way to work.
The Office suites
At work, we have access to a whole series of interconnected online tools that allow us to interact internally and externally with colleagues, customers and suppliers. We have already normalized having meetings on video call platforms, editing files in real time in the cloud or sharing large documents in a matter of minutes with a single download link.
At lunchtime, delivery platforms are a very popular option for ordering food at home or in the office, a tool that also draws on these infrastructures.
Digital Entertainment
After leaving work, it is common to make use of entertainment platforms such as YouTube, Google’s platform where more than 2 billion users log in every month, Netflix, Prime Video or HBO to entertain us on the way home.
When we get home, asking for music or a news summary from Alexa or Siri means getting data from a Data Center, just like playing our favorite online game or using the Smart TV while relaxing on the couch.
This is also the time to shop online and purchase new products through one of the many online shopping platforms on our mobile. According to data from the INE, one in three Spanish households made a purchase online during the last year and this sector moved 72,000 million euros.
Therefore, everyday activities such as listening to a podcast or making sure you follow the fastest route to work would not be possible if data centers did not exist. Other everyday actions such as sending e-mails, accessing work tools in the cloud or doing the weekly online shopping are also part of this ecosystem.
Society indirectly uses this infrastructure for a large number of daily tasks. That is why at Nabiax we work with the objective of offering the best uninterrupted service so that access to information does not cease and Data Centers continue to be part of our daily life in a silent, efficient and sustainable way.