Digital darkness across Europe

NEWS

Digital darkness across Europe

RESEARCH from Digitopia finds that only 6% of businesses have visibility of their own digital transformation progress. Digitopia has found that 90% of businesses do not measure digital transformation strategy and are unaware of the progress that they have made throughout their journey. The same survey, which assessed businesses across the UK and Europe, also found that 65% of respondents blame this lack of awareness on being too busy with digital transformation itself to monitor its progress.

The COVID-19 pandemic made one thing very clear - businesses need to continually adapt or risk being left behind. As a result, organisations all over the world embarked on a digital transformation journey that would not only benefit businesses in short term lockdowns, but also create long term sustainability. At first, it was simple: better facilitate remote and hybrid working, leveraging the cloud to create a completely flexible working environment. However, with recovery from the pandemic well underway, the next steps in a company’s digital transformation strategy can quickly become unclear.

According to Digitopia’s latest research, this is already the case for the vast majority. The study, which analysed the responses from 700 executives - ranging across C-Suite, VP and Director roles - in 400 different companies, found that only 4% of organisations are aware of their digital transformation progression and accurately measure it.

Lack of visibility over digital transformation progression isn’t exclusive to one industry, either. The research assessed the position of businesses across several sectors, specifically: retail, consumer goods, automotive and manufacturing, insurance, banking and finance.

Of these organisations that do not track their digital transformation progress, ‘busy with digital transformation’ was cited as the most common reason for failing to measure digital maturity, with ‘no shared vision’ being the second most popular response at 47%.

The rest are as followed:

 Lack of skills and competencies (39%)  No sense of urgency (33%)  Misalignment in leadership (27%)  Disagreement on importance (13%)

“These findings have surprised us following a year where so many organisations have turned to digital transformation to continue operating.” said Halil Aksu, CEO and co-founder of Digitopia. “You manage what you measure, and it’s concerning that so few businesses are paying attention to such an important aspect of modern business. Digital transformation is more than just technology, and only by measuring, benchmarking and assessing every aspect of the journey can an organisation know where it is succeeding, and where it needs improvement. Only then can these businesses see a maximum return on investment and deliver sustainable, long term business success.”

FLAP markets surpass 2,000MW

THE MARKET SAW 51MW come online in Q2. CBRE expects to see 442MW of new supply come online this year, with 130MW expected to come online during Q3, just short of the 133MW that came online during Q1.

The FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) data centre markets – the four largest in Europe - have collectively surpassed 2,000MW of supply for the first time.

This follows a quiet Q2, where only 51MW of new supply came online, but a much larger Q1, when 135MW of supply came online. There is still 256MW of supply scheduled to come online during H2, which will lead to a record year for new supply with 442MW coming online. This is more than double the 202MW seen in the last record year of 2017. In terms of take-up, the quarter saw just more than half the take-up of Q1, when 92MW came online (a record quarter for take-up).

CBRE expects the second half of the year will see more than 229MW of customer supply come online, leading to a record year for take-up (the last record for take-up was set in 2020 at 201MW). According to the report, most new supply is being driven by hyperscale cloud deals. A number of providers, in particular those in the retail colocation space, have said they are also seeing increasing interest from enterprise and other customer groups not associated with cloud. Many enterprises are turning to colocation as they move data centres out of traditional office environments or turn to colocation to gain access to cloud services and connectivity options.

In some markets, opportunities for such customers are becoming increasingly difficult to find with locations such as Frankfurt and Paris experiencing supply constraints. It is unsurprising that these markets will see local records broken for new supply during 2021 (Frankfurt with 167MW and Paris with 87MW). Take-up in these markets will also be at record levels – with Frankfurt expected to see 125MW for the year and Paris 85MW.

CBRE EMEA Data Centre Research Director, Penny-Madsen Jones commented: “We are hearing more about new sites coming on specifically to meet enterprise requirements at the same time as a large number of hyperscale-focused sites are being launched. The industry realises the importance of having a healthy ecosystem of cloud providers and cloud end users in a market to maintain the importance of the data centre hub. The balance of supply and demand, as a result, is going to remain incredibly important for these markets moving forward. While we have seen some customers explore new market options outside of FLAP as a result of these challenges, many still have requirement to be inside markets they may be serving.”