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In the data center industry, change is the rule. If anything is certain, it’s that 2018 will bring more data from more sources and that deluge of data will precipitate more changes in the way operators and businesses alike handle the situation. Today, we’ll be focusing on one trend that began to take shape in 2017 and will almost certainly continue to gain steam in 2018.
That is the movement away from on-premise data centers and increased reliance on third party providers by large enterprises and medium sized businesses alike. Let’s take a look at some of the primary reasons why this mass migration is likely to continue in 2018.

Using expert cloud providers enables innovation on a new level.

For many, this seems to be the primary driver. As John Nichols, director of enterprise architecture at California utility PG&E pointed out to Network World, “Things may appear similar to legacy data center technologies, but the cloud operates in exponential terms. It is radically different.” Indeed, cloud services today enable IT departments to do a lot more than simply store data efficiently.

More data means more strain on the power grid.

Most people in the industry are aware that data centers consume massive amounts of power. Data Centres of the world will consume 1/5 Of Earth’s power By 2025. As analysts estimate as many as 50 billion devices to be connected by 2020, with some statistics pointing to more than 100 billion a further five years down the line, new alarming research suggests that data centres will be one of the biggest energy consumers on the planet, beating many countries’ energy consumption levels/ The good news here is that rather than use more and more power (and create more harmful emissions) to run on-premise data centers, enterprises are shifting workloads into third party facilities that are investing heavily into green power and next-generation cooling technologies.

Data center technologies are evolving rapidly.

Cooling technologies aren’t the only aspect of data center operations that is changing. In fact, AI and machine learning are quickly becoming a requirement in order to compute larger amounts of data and make faster, smarter decisions. Rather than try to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation (and the capital investment that goes along with it) enterprises are choosing to rely on companies that specialize exclusively in data center operations.

For many, the risk is becoming too much to manage.

At this point, everyone has seen the damage that incidents like data breaches and downtime can cause for a business. As cyberattacks are getting more sophisticated and common and data is becoming more abundant and precious, many organizations see this as reason enough to colocate in a third-party facility with a reputation for security and reliability.
While there are certain to be numerous significant changes in the data center industry in 2018, we think the mass migration of enterprises from their on-premise data centers to third party cloud providers will be one of the most visible. What trends do you see on the horizon?