After the rush in digital adoption over the past two years, the challenge now is to meet new expectations and deliver optimised user experiences. Both consumer and business users have become comfortable with digital services and now there’s an opportunity to maintain and expand their use of cloud-based applications, content services, and digital platforms.

In 2020, there was a five-year leap forward in business and consumer digital adoption in just eight weeks, according to McKinsey. In only a few months, organisations globally accelerated their digital transformation projects by three to four years. The speed of change has been tremendous, but maintaining this momentum requires delivering optimised experiences for end users. 

McKinsey’s report, “What’s Next for Digital Consumers?” says, “The pandemic may have accelerated all things digital, but consumers paint a different picture of the post-pandemic future, saying that in some industries they will reduce their use of digital channels. Even accounting for the difficulty that survey respondents experience when predicting their own future behaviour, this finding may concern companies looking to maintain the advances in digital adoption they made during the pandemic.”

Enterprises that want to keep the ground they’ve gained over the last two years should focus on maximising uptime, reducing latency, and getting as close to their users as possible. Applications, services and digital platforms should be hosted in the nearest proximity to target users to ensure performance. This way, enterprises can meet new user expectations and deliver experiences that create long-term loyalty within digital channels.

McKinsey rightfully points out that you can hold on to new digital consumers by improving digital experiences.

For data centre operators, this means having facilities in more local markets and developing digital hubs that support this new growth in digital adoption. It is not enough to rely on a handful of global hubs when cloud, content and communications are increasingly localised and require new levels of performance.

Hosting applications, services and digital platforms in local digital hubs will support long-term digital adoption and enable enterprises to keep users from returning to the offline world to consume services. Not only will enterprises be prepared for the next disruption, but more importantly, they’ll be positioned to support the growth of local digital economies.

This is just one of the reasons why EDGNEX is building the next digital hubs and breaking ground on data centre facilities in some of the fastest growing markets in the world. We are focused on ensuring that local enterprises have access to world-leading digital infrastructure and are able to serve today’s digital consumers as well as the next generation of digital innovators.