There is a myriad of practical reasons why it is an opportune time for Indonesia to build its first few tier IV data centres. A tier IV data centre is considered the most advanced and robust of all data centres – with 99.995 per cent availability and two power sources for backup uses.

It is intended for companies that need to function with virtually zero downtime, such as financial institutions, government agencies and e-commerce firms. Machine-learning and artificial intelligence software may be applied to help with maintenance and optimisation of data centres, to eliminate any chance of faults and downtime.

The obvious reason for building a tier IV data centre is that such a centre is able to handle large amounts of data and transactions successfully, without disruption. But just as important is the need for Indonesia to reduce its reliance on overseas data centres that make up for the country’s relative lack of processing capability and quality infrastructure.

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Utilising a high-quality data centre locally would reduce latency significantly as there will be less reliance on international links. While a reduction of 6 milliseconds per transaction may seem negligible, this can be applied across millions of transactions happening at any moment, easing information bottlenecks.

For overseas data flows, data is mainly transmitted through subsea cables. Despite more people streaming, and with more content going around the world, the bandwidth of a subsea cable remains limited. If a data centre is built locally and closer to the source of data, it will remove a lot of the traffic on these cables.

The data center of the future must be highly scalable so as to meet the growing demand for infrastructure space.

Jakarta currently has 50.2MW data centre capacity with an incremental 70MW in the pipeline by 2021. The new data centres will apply best practice principles to be scalable, secure and efficient.

At least one campus will be energy self-sufficient to operate reliably, designed to have a lower impact on the natural environment, with high fault tolerance and high uptime availability. This will give customers who have established themselves in Jakarta more opportunities to expand quickly, knowing that there is available capacity at hand.

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The last thing expanding enterprises would want is to split their data load across a multitude of low capacity data centres. It is a highly unproductive way of managing data flows. Enterprises need a common facility that can provide inter-connectivity between their various applications, so that they can respond to their customers fast and provide a higher standard of service.

Indonesia’s power grid is currently being pushed to its limits, which is a challenge for information-based enterprises that rely on a constant availability of data to get through the day.

Furthermore, natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods pose a constant threat. One never knows when the next calamity will strike, nor if it will disturb the electrical supply.

Fortunately for Indonesia, its island chain lies on large natural gas reserves. As pipelines run throughout Jakarta, a data centre campus could be strategically located to access natural gas to power its campus.

Clean power is carbon efficient. A gas-run data centre produces 2.3 units of carbon for every kilowatt hour, whereas a typical data centre produces 4 units of carbon for every kilowatt hour.

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Any waste heat generated by the data centre is put through a heat exchanger for cooling purposes, further boosting carbon efficiencies. Diesel generators can provide backup in case of a fault in the natural gas supply.

But the bigger purpose behind using cleaner power sources is to bring about environmental sustainability over the long-term. Plans are in place already to build data centres that run on renewable energy across Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Like Indonesia, these countries are fast moving digital markets that have very high mobile penetration rates.

While they may not be powered by natural gas, alternative forms of energy to fossil fuels, such as hydropower may be used, or even solar power, if enough solar energy can be stored to run a data centre 24/7.

Data centres are one of the most energy-intensive structures in the world. A new breed of data centre companies aim to do more with less, as we need to consider future generations and the planet they are going to inherit.

Darren Hawkins is CEO of Singapore-based SpaceDC, which is creating state-of-the-art data centres to help businesses grow in Southeast Asia’s fast-moving digital markets.