Companies have been able to unload a lot of the complexity required in running a data center by moving to the cloud, which provides access to compute, storage, and network as a commodity. However, enterprises that use several cloud providers while maintaining or implementing on-premises solutions to host legacy applications or for niche use cases such as edge or high-security requirements face new hurdles.
The core concept of how a data center provides services, as well as its very definition, is fast evolving, as are the expectations of future application developers.
So, what happens next? What will the next data center look like? What capabilities and circumstances should it be able to handle? New workload demands, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices, data security, and laws, are posing new difficulties and opportunities. Future data centers must have the following characteristics.
Flexible
To accommodate a variety of situations, new data centers will need to be extremely adaptable. Public cloud providers will play an important role in the future, but let's start with on-premises systems, which will remain important.
On-premises systems may prove to be more cost-effective than public cloud counterparts in some use scenarios but it is only applicable when the expense is not eclipsed by the complexity and danger involved.
Public Cloud service providers usually have huge storage spaces, and even at reasonable rates as they follow to pay-per-usage model. Also, they are flexible in terms of providing cloud storage compliant with specific industry standards like banking, government, enterprise, etc.
Distributed
The capability to be distributed should be another attribute of sophisticated Data centers. There are three primary motivations for constructing dispersed infrastructure.
- The first is to avoid single points of failure to reduce outages and data loss. Power outages, fires, system failures, human error, network disruption, and system outages are just a handful of the numerous potential catastrophes that might occur in a data center. Companies avoid these risks by deploying infrastructure across numerous geographically dispersed data centers.
- The second consideration is proximity. 5G-enabled hyperconnectivity is pushing the envelope. Future data centers will serve an increasing number of devices at the edge, as data is being consumed and created there:
- Street furniture in smart cities, parking sensors, video surveillance, and self-driving cars are all examples of data closets. Proximity has several advantages, including reduced latency and lower data transit costs. Some even say that the cloud computing era is reaching its limits because of proximity.
Finally, businesses are increasingly compelled to maintain data location control to ensure regulatory compliance, data sovereignty, and data protection. Data centers will need to work seamlessly with hosting infrastructures all over the world to meet jurisdictional and customer needs to be matched with the General Data Protection Regulation and other data protection legislation.
This feature will be crucial given the hyper concentration of major cloud providers in a small number of countries today.
Outstanding User Experience
Easy use should not be sacrificed for distribution and flexibility. Cloud-native capabilities, such as the capacity to scale compute and storage resources on-demand, as well as API access for integrations, must be available in data centers. While this is standard practice for containers and virtual machines on servers, the same capabilities should be available in other settings, including IoT and edge servers.
Final Word
The data center of the future resembles today's multi-cloud or hybrid cloud in many ways. Despite the fact that two-thirds of CIOs wish to use many suppliers, just 29% do, and 95% of their cloud money is spent with only one cloud service provider. It means that there is a strong need that has yet to be met.
