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Safe data storage has become a hot topic.
Data center trends reflect company’s’ interest in protecting their data while having easy access to it. This is making data centers more critical among CEOs and CIOs.
Data Information is gold, and that gold needs a reliable storage vault.
Let’s look at what IT can expect in data center trends for 2018.
1. AI Will Change How Data Centers Operate
Artificial intelligence makes the news daily, and with good reason. It will change the way we do business. Data centers will see AI not only directing workflow, but altering the network’s physical connections. AI can analyze an entire system and gain insights about how to modify it for efficiency and security.
The trend toward monitoring networks with software will continue to dominate. Data centers will be automated, and connections will change on a rolling basis.
In the event of a breach, AI can cut off pathways while staff finds a way to eliminate the malware.
AI will handle information that does not fit neatly into categories such as text, pictures, and video. Interconnected devices generate data that is hard to categorize, and AI will manage data center decisions about how to handle that data.
2. Blockchain lead to data center growth
As blockchain carries the record of every transaction in the chain, any changes in one place affect the whole chain. This means the content of the chain needs storage along with a record of changes.
3. Companies will Spend More on Security and data center infrastructure
The Interop ITX and InformationWeek 2018 State of Infrastructure Report shows that 59% of businesspeople responding to the survey expect their companies to spend more on data security. The security concern was in the top 3 for these firms.
This will means more security for data storage. Data centers will be expected to improve safety measures along their ability to identify and fight off attacks.
It is fair to say that security will heavily influence a company’s decision of whether to buy more space with a data center.
4. IT Infrastructure Spending will Continue to Grow
The Study mentioned earlier shows that among top IT professionals, 45% said they will invest in information infrastructure.
Driving forces for this increased spending include new business opportunities and increased demands from the workforce.
5. Data centers will Offer Changing Workflows
The data center will continue its transformation from a place to store existing data and systems. Analysis and insight will occur in the data center, creating new data flows between interconnected diversified environments.
In short, the data center will become a place where information is not only stored, but also manipulated.
6. Service Providers Will Consolidate
As the need for data increases, the amount of data centers will decrease. This counterintuitive trend results from the growth of mega data centers. In 2018, mega centers will account for 70% of all data center construction.
This will increase the need to create firewalls and cutoff points for interconnected environments to avoid the spread of a cyber attack or corrupted data.
7. Geoplanning will Determine Which Data centers to Use
As companies increasingly deal with a global market, the need to have access to data without delays will increase. This means storing data nearer to customers so that not all data remains at company headquarters. This will improve the ability to respond to data requests in the event of a problem at the home location.
8. Data center as a Service (DCaaS) will Experience Increased Demand
Cloud-based data storage offers low-cost entry, and companies find the ability to access the data from multiple locations attractive. Businesses will increasingly make decisions about which data and processes to store in the cloud instead of in physical data centers.
The implications are that companies will need the ability for their data centers to communicate with cloud computing services.
9. Application Programming Interfaces (API) will Be Vital
The integration of applications will be the cornerstone of IT. When applications do not talk to each other, the result is interrupted workflow. This can cause customer dissatisfaction. To give an example, customers who experience as little as a two-second delay in a webpage loading tend to move on and never come back.
On a larger scale, security applications that can’t communicate with operations will delay actions that could have been taken to contain a breach.
Data centers will provide API as standard fare, moving further toward being a service rather than being a hardware facility.
The Bottom Line
The era of the data center as a mere storage facility is changing. Businesses expect a range of active services, including the ability to analyze and manage data in the data center, and the option of reconfiguring infrastructure on an as-needed basis.
AI remains the wildcard. No one knows what it may do as it moves from task-specific functionality to general AI. General AI means the ability to perform unrelated tasks across a broad range of data.
That development is still in the future, but will impact what businesses expect from a data center. It is conceivable that all company functions could be fed into the data center and managed by AI.
One thing remains certain. The amount of data processed will grow exponentially. Big data is here to stay, and companies increasingly need the ability to analyze and draw conclusions from that data.
This will no longer be the exclusive concern of in-house personnel, but will become an expected function of the data center.
Finally, the industry may see a development that overrides all the trends: the ability for data centers to communicate with each other. Businesses interconnect with other companies worldwide, and retrieving data for any transaction will require access to two or more data centers.
