Trends 2016: Data Centers Overloaded?

By Ashok Rao

Exponential growth in computing devices and data brought about by various channels are placing new burdens and requirements on the data centers.

Information Technology has witnessed enormous change in the way one communicates and stores information. The digitization of the core businesses, digitization of industries and digital ecosystems has called for various effective and inventive ways of storing data.

Data centers began as a way of storing the data at a centralized datacenter located within the vicinity of an organization which enabled quick access to all the data of an organization.

Today’s changing technology and business models demand elasticity or flexibility in the way data is stored and retrieved when required, the emerging market forces impacting industries and geographies and exponential growth in computing devices and data brought about by various channels are placing new burdens and requirements on the data centers in terms of being able to collect manage and interpret this information to support existing business decision-making.

Hence, the year 2016 will prove to be a challenging year for all the telcos/ vendor companies to adapt to the new and sudden changes in the operations of businesses and the data storage. The most trending segments in the data centers are as follows:

Cloud Computing:

Cloud business is evolving to be more than just connecting IT resources and services. Cloud Communications are attractive because the cloud can now become a platform for Voice, data and video.

Most hosted services have been built around voice, and are usually referred to as hosted VoIP.

The next wave will address the issues of the capital investment to set up datacenters for a small or medium-sized business and with the growing trend of startups in the country, it is quite difficult for the small or medium sized companies to set up datacenters in-house which could be too high compared to the potential return, but cloud computing can offer the same services on a lower-cost subscription basis.

Cloud computing provides an abstracted versions of servers, storage, networking, etc, of datacenters in a virtual form that are not tied to a specific datacenter like virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual networking.

Internet of Things:

The IoT connects remote assets and provides a data stream between the asset and centralized management systems.

Aggressive growth of IoT posing threat to the security, capacity and analytics requires the datacenters to restructure the processes that handle the IoT data.

Recent report by the Gartner Inc. research firm estimates that the IoT will include 26 billion units by 2020 which will drive the demand for data centers across the borders.

IoT devices will send a large amount of data which makes it difficult to decode in real-time by mere one or two data centers which opens the door for more data centers to operate to provide realtime solutions.

SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Technologies):

SMAC creates an ecosystem that allows a business to improve its operations and get closer to the customer with minimal overhead and maximum reach.

Digitization of businesses and adopting new technologies are driving vast changes in how data centers are located, designed and consumed.

Social media has provided new way to business to connect to their customers and interact, mobile has revolutionized the way we communicate, analytics gives an insight on when, where and how customers consume certain goods and services and cloud computing provides access to technology and data to provide realtime solutions to businesses.

Rapid growth in SMAC will give way to new forms of data centers that provides accessibility to the data anytime and anywhere in no time.

(The author, Ashok Rao, is Director Strategy – Planning & Alliances, IT Business, Schneider Electric)