
What did the arrival of cloud computing mean for the data center market? As you know, cloud computing has brought a series of new possibilities for those who need to consume IT resources.
For companies that consume technology, opting for the cloud has become a natural path, a trend, anchored by significant advantages. What, then, is the fate of the old owned facilities and the traditional data centers that provided services to these companies? As we will see below, the data center market has also undergone an adaptation to suit the cloud.
The need to consume IT resources
The constant evolution of technologies makes adaptation to them mandatory. Technologies such as the internet of things, Big Data and Software as a Service are essential for companies to remain competitive. Thus, an adequate structure must be available to companies for the use of these and other resources.
Now, most companies do not have technology as their main business, although they are extremely dependent on it. It is in this context that the data center market comes into play , offering all the technological infrastructure needed by companies.
It is not by chance that the data center market continues to grow, both in terms of service provision and quality. In addition to internal processing needs, more and more companies offer services directly supported by a digital infrastructure. This is the case, for example, with video and music streaming services, e-commerce, social networks, etc.
Cloud computing in the data center market
The development of the cloud has brought new possibilities, both for companies that consume and for those that provide technology. On the one hand, companies of the most varied sizes and segments have chosen to deactivate their own data centers, starting to acquire the services provided by providers.
There are many facilities offered by cloud computing, such as:
- Direct cost reduction, since the company stops investing in the acquisition and maintenance of infrastructure (hardware and software);
- Access to advanced IT features such as updated software versions;
- Productivity gains, offered by mobility in accessing resources;
- Etc.
Previously, budgetary constraints for IT investment were, in themselves, a constraint on business growth. A survey carried out by Unisys for the Latin American market shows that companies that are migrating to cloud solutions have obtained a direct reduction in IT costs of around 20%.
In recent years, there has been an intensification of data center mergers and acquisitions, revealing an accommodation movement in the scenario. In most cases, the transactions involve competing operators, sometimes joining together in joint ventures, sometimes incorporating smaller companies or being incorporated by larger companies, always in the sense of forming more robust structures.
In addition, there is also the acquisition of facilities deactivated by companies that started to consume cloud services. The end result is a significant growth in the number of data centers connected to cloud computing providers.
Trends for the data center market
An estimate by the Gartner Group indicates that by 2022, 80% of large companies in North America will have completely decommissioned their own data centers. Another survey, from the Cisco Global Cloud Index, points to an increase in cloud data traffic on the order of 3.7 times between 2015 and 2020, from 3.9 zettabytes to 14.1 ZB. One zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes.
This same study indicates that by 2020, 92% of data processing will be done by cloud providers, against 8% by traditional data centers. It is also estimated that there will be a significant growth in the use of the public cloud, which will account for 68% of all cloud processing load, up from 49% in 2015.
Some technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, will be responsible for a gigantic growth in the volume of data trafficked and processed by companies. By 2020, the IoT alone is expected to generate something around 600 zettabytes of data per year.
In turn, Big Data should be one of those responsible for raising the total data stored in data centers to something around 915 exabytes, five times more than the total stored in 2015. An exabyte corresponds to a billion gigabytes.
With all this growth in the volume of data trafficked and stored, more and more space is opening up for the so-called hyperscale datacenters, which are characterized by their efficiency in adapting to the required volumes. An interesting effect that the growth of data centers should bring concerns hardware and software vendors. Increasingly, these companies will have data centers as consumers and no longer companies in general.
What changes in data centers
A futuristic image (perhaps not so much) that is projected is that IT services will be provided in a similar way to electricity, with high availability and low cost.
Cloud-based data centers certainly play an important role in this scenario.
Over the next few years, data centers will be at the forefront of absorbing important changes, such as:
- Edge Computing technology, with increased processing on local devices, bringing gains in response time and relief in server processing load;
- Connectivity to 5G networks;
- The growing use of SSD-based storage systems;
- Expansion of information security resources, with increased use of biometrics and artificial intelligence.