Creating Next Level Digital Infrastructure for the Gaming Industry

A new white paper from Iron Mountain explores the current challenges, drivers, and opportunities around gaming digital infrastructure.

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The gaming industry is growing at a rapid pace, according to a new white paper from Iron Mountain. With more than “3 billion players worldwide and $200 billion in value,” the industry is hungry for speed.

Cloud, mobile, and multiplayer gaming are all shifting the fast-moving industry, as are eSports and the advancement of 5G technologies. Iron Mountain says, “one of the core challenges that these shifts create is future-proof infrastructure design, a problem which can only be solved through a series of strategic partnership agreements which will locate the next generations of games (and the next generation of the Internet) on the doorstep of both current and next generation gamers.”

The paper first outlines how key commercial and technological factors are driving major platform shifts in the gaming industry. Latency / lag, 5G market opportunities, sustainability, bandwidth, scalability, and new financial models such as blockchain are all discussed.

The author then explores the infrastructure components that data centers must consider when entering into strategic partnerships with gaming platforms. Critical ecosystems, uptime, resilience, security, remote management, reach and scalability are key. The paper notes that “provider capability in capacity and power planning must be up to providing timely space and operational support for core and partner servers and connections.”

From ecosystems to uptime, sustainability to edge expansion, the key to making data center decisions that will power next generation gaming platforms is the mix of reliability and investment in growth which make for a productive long-term partnership. – Iron Mountain, “From Console to Cloud”

The paper also discusses cloud to core convergence and how edge infrastructure can support the volume of data that will be created by next generation games.

Finally, the author explores the role of colocation in creating next level digital infrastructure for the gaming industry. According to the paper, “interconnected colocation capability that unites core, cloud and edge is critical to both game design and control and quality of gaming experience.”

Download the full report to learn more about the shifting gaming digital infrastructure.