Remember ten years ago? Facebook was this fairly new thing that all the kids did, and mom and dad were recently exposed to. Twitter was 140 characters of new hotness. And then there was this buzz word that everyone used called “cloud.”

Change is a part of any industry, driven by innovators who recognize the need to grow. This philosophy was elegantly underscored in a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Genius of the Tinkerer.” The author, Stephen Johnson, referenced what he called the philosophy of the adjacent possible.

Across the planet, end users and organizations are generating and consuming unprecedented volumes of data. But it can be challenging to comprehend just how fast data is growing worldwide and what the implications are for storing, managing, and accessing all of that data.

The seamless interconnect of data center facilities is needed to deliver lightning-fast speeds, and yet internet content providers (ICPs) have grown at such a rate there has barely been enough time to create the rigorous testing regiment necessary.

Fire up the Wayback Machine, and let’s travel back to the year 1996 — the time when the Telecommunications Act paved a competitive pathway for traditional phone companies and internet businesses.

The data center industry is experiencing unprecedented growth. There is currently 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, and this pace is accelerating with the emergence of the IoT. By the year 2020, the IoT will comprise more than 30 billion connected devices.