23 February, 2017           

“We are going faster than we ever thought.” These were the words of William Barney, CEO Global Cloud Exchange and CEO of Reliance Communications during Datacloud Asia 2017 in Singapore.

The speed at which innovation is disrupting markets across the globe is faster than anyone has ever predicted and data centres are having to adapt while managing the associated challenges and overcome barriers to serve the global digital economy.

Taking to the stage, Barney labelled today as one of the most interesting phases in history in terms of cloud adoption. This is because the landscape of who is using the cloud has dramatically shifted over the last 12 months.

He said: “Software has changed, hardware has changed, infrastructure has changed, the network has changed. All this has allowed big data to come in.

“What is enabling this is the cloud, and data centre operators are behind this.

“Anyone in the hosting space will tell you this is the golden age for data centres.”

This golden age is evolving and the opportunities for providers that know how to reap the benefits from such revolution will be huge.

By 2020, the number of connected devices is expected to top 50 billion, the number of connected people four billion and the IoT is predicted to account for up to 3% of the world’s power consumption, according to Gartner.

This will drive not only a $5tr economy but also a large demand for cloud services, and consequently, data centres.

The disruptive opportunities here are set to change everything as we know it starting with the infrastructure which will become more orchestrated and split into larger, medium and smaller facilities to keep the connected world functioning 24/7.

Barney said: “The networked data centre will be at the core of the future. Distributed focused compute centres will be the wave of the future.

“Orchestration is at the core. Data centres are not just about connectivity and the space. It is about having the whole ecosystem in place, have the network in place, orchestration facilities and IoT services.”

Barney has also touched upon the large opportunities in emerging markets across the globe, especially in Africa and Asia.

He said: “Whoever can make the emerging markets their home will have an unprecedented advantage with huge demand ahead.

“Innovating and expanding across emerging markets will reap biggest benefits for the cloud as requirements growth.

“Most of the world’s population in the world is underserved; the emerging markets are high growth and underserves. 75% of world’s population is in emerging markets and data centre owners will be big winners in the next decade.”

Another factor weighing into the equation is the fact that no emerging market has a clear data centre leader as the large colocation providers are all grouped in North America and Europe.

https://data-economy.com/golden-age-data-centres-global-cloud-exchange-ceo-opens-huge-opportunities-lie-ahead/