1/ Edge data centres are set to rise
Media streaming for gaming, music and video companies across all devices including mobile means that buffering is a waiting game that few are willing to play. Brands are being measured and rated on their website speed.
2/ The demand for London DCs will increase
Brexit has brought about a greater need for data sovereignty and for consumers to understand that their data in held in a country with data privacy laws they have confidence in. London continues to be the number one city location for colocation, with 72% of UK consumers highlighting that they would feel more confident if they knew their data was being stored in London rather than other European cities.
3/ Some London data centres will go through large overhauls (with a higher risk of disruption for customers)
Data centres originally based in Docklands and outside of the M25 were built in the 1990s and don’t have the resilience needed by our data heavy infrastructure. These now need a massive overhaul, creating headaches and risks for customers.
4/ Older data centres risk overload with the data deluge the new world is bringing
Customers who are invested in older data centres (25 years or more) will be more at risk of suffering outages due to outdated equipment, such as in examples we’ve seen in 2016. Outages experienced in 2016 highlight the need for a rejuvenation of equipment in the data centre industry.
5/ Companies will demand contract models which are based on usage, requiring more flexibility from partners / providers
Power-by-the hour is set to become the watchword for the data centre. Certain industries, such as Media and Gaming, will demand unprecedented flexibility that can support the changing demands of their own sectors such as post-production.
6/ The rise of data centre density
Legacy equipment is finding its way out of enterprise data centres, giving way to new equipment capable of more computing in a smaller footprint. With customers being more aware of the amount of data they use and how they are using it, they are looking to data centres to use supercomputing technologies, such as High Performance Computing clusters which exploit parallel processing to enable advanced, resource intensive applications to be run efficiently, quickly and sustainably.
