What’s driving data centre demand and should you follow suit?

Data centres have become an integral factor of private and hybrid cloud strategies. As the cloud continues to grow in popularity, as businesses look to take advantage of digital trends, data centres are more in demand – but what are the main drivers?

Cloud adoption

The shift to the cloud> is no big secret; in fact, according to LogicMonitor’s Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of Cloud Study, 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the Cloud by 2020. While many people may visualise the cloud as an elusive storage unit that lives online, the reality is that it resides in data centres and is taking up more and more space. With the surge of cloud computing, there’s been an increase in demand for extra data centres. Cloud has gone from niche to conventional in just a matter of years. Enterprises are continuing to shift their IT from on-premise data centres to off-premise colocation, hosted private cloud and public cloud environments.

Internet of Things expansion

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity which enables them to connect, collect and exchange data. Cisco Systems estimate that the IoT was ‘born’ between 2008 and 2009, a definition based on a point in time when more ‘things or objects’ were connected to the Internet than people. The things/people ratio grew from 0.08 in 2003 to 1.84 in 2010.In order to manage and process the real-time data that devices and sensors are providing, many are turning to data centres, such as SCC.

Analytics workloads

Not only does the cloud allow for data storage for IoT processes, it also permits the processing of IoT data. Currently the most popular location for analysis of IoT-generated data is public cloud (39%), followed by data colocation facilities (30%); local computing devices attached to data generators (30%); within network operator infrastructure (31%) and on-premise data centres (35%).

Driving forwards

The data centre environment has become the heart of any organisation as the central IT resource and is set to continue to be unquestionably important. In the near future, we’re likely to see new types of demands and business requirements, that will heavily rely on the data centre. <!–If you’re organisation isn’t yet utilising a third-party data centre for your IT needs, then contact SCC today to find out how you will benefit from our co-location managed service.–>