How Defying Data Gravity Can Help Korea’s Digital New Deal Initiative Succeed

Investing in Korea’s Digital Future

The demand for data-driven services in Korea is being backed by companies in industries including payment technologies, adtech, gaming and fintech. All are rapidly growing their businesses and looking to expand globally.

At the same time, the digital landscape is set to undergo further evolution through the government’s Digital New Deal initiative. This ambitious nationwide digital transformation initiative targets 12 strategic goals in education, the digitization of social overhead capital, nurturing of contactless services and improvements to the digital, network and artificial (DNA) ecosystem.

A new investment of US$191 billion, announced in July 2021, will continue the New Deal’s investment in fundamentally changing the way Korea’s government and business ecosystem operate.

This strategy will rely heavily on the collection, sharing and use of data – with plans to establish 31 big data platforms and 1,300 AI training data sets to support the creation of a national online information platform, the Digital Jiphyeonjeon.

Overcoming the Weight of Data Gravity

At its core, the Digital New Deal initiative is about collecting, organizing, and using data to monitor and improve every aspect of our lives. But without the right infrastructure to manage that data, such an ambitious plan is destined for challenges.

One major challenge is overcoming the force of data gravity – the collective challenge of managing ever-larger amounts of data within the context of ever-increasing business and regulatory challenges.

These challenges include, for example, the need for enterprise data stewardship, with 80 percent of data expected to reside in enterprises by 2025.

The complexities of mergers and acquisitions will increase the number of data sources participating in data exchanges, as will the increasing collection of data to support and refine digitally enabled interactions.

All of this data collection will happen within legal and regulatory frameworks requiring local data storage, as well as an ever-changing cybersecurity climate where the integration of physical and digital security systems will create new risks that must be managed through the use of even more data.

A New Dawn For Korea’s Data Centers

These developments have led to a rapid increase in demand for new data centers – especially facilities that can accommodate high-density racks of GPU/IPU servers.

Digital Realty’s PlatformDIGITAL® offers these capabilities, giving data centers a decentralized IT architecture that brings users, networks, clouds, controls, and systems to the data – creating centers of data exchange to accommodate fast-growing distributed workflows.

Recognizing Korean businesses’ rapid growth in demand for data-driven services, we have brought PlatformDIGITAL® to Seoul with the construction of our first carrier and fiber-neutral colocation data center in Korea, Digital Seoul 1 (ICN10).

This is a significant step for Digital Realty, which is already the world’s largest owner, operator, and developer of data centers with over 290 data centers in 24 countries across six continents.

Helping Companies Transform

I’m proud to have been involved with helping bring ICN10 to fruition, with the facility scheduled for delivery by the last quarter of 2021.

I have been supporting data-driven transformation for many years, having worked in systems and network services for companies including SK Broadband, &TV Communications, LG CNS Co, and Huawei Korea.

During that time, I helped deliver innovative network, IPTV and content delivery projects that relied on large-scale data centers to deliver services to hundreds of thousands of customers simultaneously.

Defying Data Gravity, Together

Today, in my new role as Sales Director for Digital Realty in Korea, I look forward to helping drive the same transformation by assisting enterprise, gaming, government and other services to build the digital infrastructure needed to support the data-driven future.

The goal of the Digital New Deal, as described by President Moon Jae-in when he announced it, is to add digital capabilities to industries across the board – and, in so doing, to “help transform our economy from a fast-follower into a pace-setter”.

This is an ambitious goal, and one that will be realized one transformation project at a time.

It is my great pleasure to be involved with Digital Realty’s expansion in Korea at such a pivotal moment.

I look forward to working with companies of all kinds to help you tap into the power of data in new, transformative ways. Endless possibilities await us – so let’s work together to deliver on the promise of the Digital New Deal.