It is the right time to look at 2016 and project data center trends for 2017 as we have just entered twenty seventeen. Since the year that has just gone by, witnessed multiple challenges faced by data center professionals, it can be safely predicted that the New Year will also be marked by more such challenges.

Most of the challenges including security regulations, growing demands of compute power, and proliferation of disruptive technologies are sure to continue even in this year. We need to understand emerging trends in the backdrop of data explosion and disruptive technologies that are putting significant strain on density and power, and major developments in IT infrastructure facilities.

Adoption of new technologies

In order to cater to growing demands and stay on top of the competition, data centers will need to acquire new technologies. This will also help record and monitor real time condition of equipment and environment to make sure that the overall operations are not interrupted.

Data centers need to adopt modern technologies that consist of equipment with sensors for measuring parameters of IT environment and monitoring network equipment. This is also essential for reliable uptime and reduction of capital expenditure.

New paradigms of security

The entire environment of data center is going to witness impact of new technology whether it is related to multiple resource usages or need for greater security measures. The rise in security concerns is mainly attributed to cloud adoption, emergence of Internet of Things, and software defined architecture.

In some of the verticals of businesses including banking, healthcare, and ecommerce the security standards need to extremely high. Use of conventional security measures will slowly make way for high end security solutions that can provide impregnable protection by using state of the art tools. This explains the need for replacing DevOps by DevSecOps for integration of security into the entire business operation.

Impact of IoT

It is a common understanding that Internet of Things will be responsible for proliferation of 25 billion interconnected devices by 2020. Although, this may sound as a great new development in the technology horizon, IoT is going to exert unprecedented pressure on data centers since it will be producing massive amount of information that will have to be stored. Greater storage needs are certainly going to take a toll on data center capacities as well as operating staff.

Data center automation

Automation of data center operations will be become essential as more and more workloads will have to be executed due to growing demands of storage, security, and so forth. Agility and responsiveness of data centers can only be ensured by way of automation that will also guarantee reduction of workloads and scope for manual errors.

As a result there will be standardization of data center automation. There will be change in requirement of skill sets since most of the repetitive processes such as storage provisioning will be managed by way of automation. IT professional will have to acquire knowledge of emerging technologies since most of the old technologies will turn out to be obsolete.  

Subdued demand for new data centers

There is a possibility of number of data centers to peak at some point after the total number of data centers hit the mark of 8.6 million. The prediction has a sound basis of a survey conducted by IDC. The peak will mark the saturation of number of data centers and further decline in numbers of data centers will be due to emergence of mega data centers. This will also be a simultaneous maturing of cloud sources that will provide support to center operations.

However, there will be growth in overall data center space. This mean that the existing data centers will have to add more and more capacities to accommodate growing storage needs of users.

Need for flexibility to encourage infrastructure outsourcing

There is a considerable pressure on organizations to stay ahead of competition by developing new products at a faster pace. This is also giving rise to the need for a flexible setup that can facilitate corporations to cope up with increased demands. According to IDC, there will be need to outsource infrastructure by outsourcing data center services to fulfill cloud and dedicated hosting needs. It will force in house data centers to either closed down or consolidate.

Shift towards greener and cooler pastures

The pursuit of greater energy efficiency will be marked by building of more data center facilities in cold regions. The data center design for the new facilities will be governed by underground constructions and use of green energy. There will be a huge demand for optimization of energy as well as higher efficiency of distribution.

More and more clients will shift their operations from traditional data center facilities to cloud. There will also be a rush to establish hyperscale data center facilities by major vendors.