A Royal Baby born into a Digital World
As the world celebrates the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby son, the latest Royal Baby and third in line to the throne, he enters a very different world to that of his parents. The new Prince’s father was born 31 years ago into a very different age. In 1982 when Prince William was born, the mobile telephone had not yet become commercially available. It was not until 1983 that the first commercially available mobile telephone was sold. Today there are over 6 billion mobile phones around the world with more than 1 mobile phone for every person in the population of many countries.
As news of the Royal Baby’s birth spreads around the world, it is ‘trending’ on Twitter and news of the birth was learned quicker by Twitter users than by any other method. Twitter was only invented in 2006, the same year that the Prince’s father, Prince William graduated from Sandhurst watched by his future wife, Catherine Middleton. His parents were already dating at the time, but would not marry for another 5 years when the wedding would be watched by viewers of over 100 million streams over the Internet in 188 countries!
When the new Prince’s father was 9 years old, Sir Tim Berners-Lee posted the first web page to what is known as the World Wide Web. Last December there were estimated to be 634 million web sites on the World Wide Web and over 2.4 billion users. Assuming that the usage of the Internet and the World Wide Web continues at a similar rate to that which it has done for the last few years, by the time that the Royal Baby is just one year old, there will probably be in the order of 810 million websites and near to 3 billion users.
So why is all of this important? And why am I reading this on a page from a data centre company? It is simply this. Data centres are the foundation of the digital age. Without data centres the world would starve, and without data centres UK Plc would be bust within a day. These may sound like outrageous claims, but think about it … no data centres = no plane travel, no ship travel, no train travel, no car travel. No data centres = no financial transactions, no stock exchanges, no banking system, no money, no credit cards. No data centres = the world stops!
Yet, despite the fact that data centres are the foundation of the digital age, they are the critical infrastructure that the entire modern day world relies upon, if one asks most people what a data centre is, they don’t know. Most politicians certainly don’t know, most people don’t know, most business leaders only have a vague idea, yet this is the fundamental infrastructure upon which not just one fragile new born baby relies, but all of us – every single one – need data centres as much today as we need water, electricity and food, because without them we would be unable to produce and distribute water, or manage our electricity, or produce and distribute disease free crops of food for us to eat. Isn’t it about time we all learned a little more about the things that are keeping us alive?
There is a huge amount still to be done in developing, producing and distributing vital food, water and medicines and data centres are a part of the critical infrastructure that is needed in order to make this happen. Data centres won’t save the world, they won’t fix all of the world’s ills, but they are essential to world ‘operation’ today and will be even more so in the future.
As we welcome the Royal Baby into the world as the newest member of our Royal Family, we must remember that he has been born into the digital age and nothing that happens in his lifetime will be more important than ensuring that the critical infrastructure that is the foundation of the digital age is there, operational and available to whenever it is needed to support all of the new challenges that the world will face.
Our data centre is always on and we will do everything within our power to ensure that it remains that way. If the world continues to evolve at the pace that it has since his mother and father were born, the data centre will be even more critical in the future than it is today.
Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their son! We welcome the new Prince into an exciting new world where the digital infrastructure will be an integral part of his growing up and future adult life.
Want to help spread the word and help others to understand what is the basis of the digital world we live in? Go on … Tweet this article and spread the word to those who, as yet, haven’t quite learned what a data centre does! You read this on the World Wide Web, using the Internet to access it and you almost certainly learned of the birth of the Royal Baby via the Internet in some way. All that relied entirely on the data centres that are its foundation!