Changing Data Centres

Hybrid cloud infrastructures, hosted servers, virtualized servers, and new methods to save energy and reduce costs in the data centre create an ever-challenging array of decisions for today’s data centre managers

It’s no secret that traditional, on-premise data centres still rule enterprise IT. According to a recent TechRepublic CIO Jury, 100% of tech leaders still run on-premise data centres but, cloud is catching up in a big way.

According to Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report, cloud spending continues to grow and it’s on track to catch up to traditional data centres spending. Citing IDC data, Meeker noted that cloud investments had grown over the past few years as traditional data centres spending shrank. If the trend continues, the two markets could eventually match one another in spending.

Spending increased in both private and public cloud, the report noted. In the public cloud market, the major players continued to dominate — Amazon Web Services (AWS) led the pack, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM, in that order.

Cloud is leading to new innovation in infrastructure and the way enterprise IT gets work done. New software delivery models mean products are being delivered through the cloud, often with a subscription model. Experiences are becoming more personalized and products are becoming more intelligent as well, the report said.

Software as a Service (SaaS), especially, will see a big boost, with many organizations turning to the model. According to another report from BetterCloud, some 73% of organizations said more than 80% of their business services and applications will be SaaS by 2020.

The growth of the cloud at this rate creates new opportunities for business, Meeker’s report said, but it also creates new concerns. While data security is still the top concern, questions about compliance and lock-in fears are increasing dramatically, the report said.

However, the question about lock-in is a complex one. While enterprises desire the unique proprietary tools that the major vendors are building out, that same R&D could be making lock-in even worse, as TechRepublic writer Matt Asay has argued.

Still, cloud availability continues to go up, while the major vendors continues to drop their prices, making the cloud an even more attractive option for big business.

The 3 big takeaways for cloud services, as we see it:

1. Data centres are still the norm in enterprise IT, but cloud spend could soon catch up, according to Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report.
2. Public and private cloud spending both increased, but concerns are shifting from security to compliance and lock-in, the report said.
3. Cloud growth is also enabling innovations in edge computing, elastic databases, containers, and microservices, which are changing the way IT thinks about infrastructure.

By Conner Forrest (TechRepublic)