January 05
After the conclusion of 2021, it’s time to look ahead at some of the key data center trends that will be shaping the colocation and cloud hosting industry in the year ahead. Although the last two years have brought with them unprecedented challenges for business, data centers have proven to be a resilient partner for organizations in their ongoing efforts to reimagine their IT infrastructure and networking strategies. That fruitful relationship will no doubt continue throughout 2022 as digital transformation efforts continue to gain momentum and support across multiple industries.
5 Data Center Trends to Watch in 2022
1. Growth of Edge Computing
Between IoT devices flooding the marketplace and more consumers signing up for digital content services, the demand for high availability, low latency networks will be greater than ever in 2022. Organizations looking to create a superior customer experience can turn to existing colocation data centers positioned in key markets to expand their edge computing capabilities and enhance their IT flexibility. Rather than centralizing their assets in a few hyperscale cloud facilities, they can instead create a versatile network that keeps data close to end users and maximizes performance.
This flexibility will be critical as many professionals working remotely choose to relocate to more affordable regions that lack the robust infrastructure found in major metro areas. Edge computing will ensure that they still have access to high performance networks for their work and recreational needs.
2. Fewer Data Center Outages
Data center reliability has been on an upward trajectory over the last few years. According to a 2021 study by the Uptime Institute, 69 percent of data center owners and operators experienced some kind of outage over a three year period, which was a marked improvement from 78 percent for the three years to 2020. What’s more, three out of four data center managers believe their most recent outage was preventable since 79 percent of them involved some form of human error. This suggests that continued improvements in automation and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools will help to reduce outages even further in 2022.
Ongoing investments in infrastructure redundancies and disaster recovery systems have already made data centers far more reliable than they were a decade ago. With many facilities now leveraging multi-cloud deployments and edge computing architecture to ensure data and essential applications remain available at all times, more organizations will be compelled to migrate their IT stack out of dated, unreliable on-premises infrastructure in 2022.
3. Improved Energy Efficiency
Since on-site power is so often involved in data center outages, measures taken to improve system uptime often have the added benefit of improving energy efficiency. Innovative DCIM platforms now utilize sophisticated monitoring to gather information about power and cooling systems so that AI-powered software can optimize them for better performance. While these tools have already been deployed in some of the world’s most advanced data centers like Evoque, they will continue to make their way into more retail colocation facilities throughout 2022 to provide better performance and value to colocation customers.
The public and regulatory pressure to minimize the environmental impact of data centers should also gain more momentum in 2022. Europe’s Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, which is pushing data centers to become climate neutral by 2030 and includes major signatories such as IBM and Intel, was launched in January of 2021 and surely marks the beginning of a global effort to reduce the energy footprint of the world’s data centers.
4. Security Enhancements
With the rise or ransomware and security breaches, it’s hardly a surprise, that the global data center security market is expected to grow from $6.9 billion in 2019 to a stunning $21.8 billion by 2026. Investments in automated security tools that use machine learning to quickly identify attack patterns and respond instantly to the first indication of an attack will help to form the first line of defense against a new generation of cyberattacks.
As organizations continue to expand their remote workforces and hybrid IT solutions, they will need better security systems in place to protect their sensitive data and applications. Data centers provide a unique combination of physical security and cybersecurity practices that can help combat ransomware and DDoS attacks, which will make them an attractive option for security-minded companies in 2022.
5. Cloud Diversification
The days of relying on a single public cloud provider for all of an organization’s technology needs are fast coming to an end. Instead, flexible hybrid and multi-cloud deployments will provide the flexibility and capacity needed to undertake true digital transformation. This transition was well underway before 2022, but it will continue to accelerate as the boundaries between cloud and colocation services become less rigid. By leveraging the power of multiple cloud providers, companies across multiple industries will be able to easily move, alter, and redeploy workloads to accommodate shifting business needs and changing customer demand.
This strategy also allows organizations to avoid the dreaded constraints of vendor lock-in and ensures that they won’t be caught off-guard when a provider’s infrastructure suffers an outage. As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated throughout 2020 and 2021, the ability to quickly adapt to the unexpected is a profound competitive advantage. Building more versatile infrastructures should therefore continue to be a top priority in 2022.
Prepare for the Challenges of 2022 with Evoque
With more than one million square feet of secure data center space, Evoque provides the secure, interconnected infrastructure that organizations need to thrive in the years to come. Innovation is a foundational element of Evoque’s colocation and cloud consulting services, allowing our network of data centers to maximize uptime, security, and resiliency.
To learn more about how Evoque can help your organization step into 2022 with confidence, talk to one of our solutions experts today.
