The Rumors of Data Centers’ Demise Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Colocation, Marketplace in Data Centers
Recently, Gartner published “Your Data Center May Not Be Dead, but It’s Morphing”, which examined the shift away from traditional, on-premise data centers as part of the evolution of infrastructure strategy being driven by workload placement. We believe the report, which targets internal Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders, clearly indicates that IT leaders are being asked to enable businesses to “be more agile, enter new markets more quickly, deliver services closer to the customer and position specific workloads based on business, regulatory and geopolitical impacts.” It goes on to state that Colocation Ecosystem Providers – such as Cyxtera – provide the digital ecosystems needed to power the agile and flexible infrastructure that is responsive to new business initiatives.
According to Gartner, “by 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options, compared with 20% in 2020. “
Practice what you preach
According to Gartner,” “Pick partners based on their vision, capabilities and their partners. When considering ecosystem partners, in particular colocation providers, it’s critical that you understand their long-term vision of the market and how its evolution is changing their strategy. You’ll find many vendors’ “vision” is to produce and provide more of the same — just in more places. However, the important question is how they are preparing for the future of digital infrastructures and how that development will enable you (as a customer) to service your business more effectively.”
In this powerful recommendation, Gartner points to the importance companies must place on their colocation providers’ long-term vision of delivering more than just space and power. This advice dovetails perfectly with what has been our approach from the beginning: To be successful, enterprises must look past short-term fixes to scalable, agile infrastructure that allows them to deliver services whenever — and wherever — they are needed.
In fact, much of what Gartner states in its recent report is what we’ve been preaching (and practicing) all along, as it articulates many of the advantages we have already been sharing with the market that are tied to our service exchange and the value of leveraging the ecosystem of service providers within our data centers.
To market, to market ….
According to Gartner, “An evolving trend in the colocation market has been the introduction of enhanced services that go well beyond traditional power, floor space and support services. These enhanced services include carrier neutrality, cloud-enabled services, access to multiple cloud services via secure networks, cross-connects to partners on the same premises, or interconnect fabrics to other sites or services. By using these fabrics, enterprise customers could have access to many different providers and services and be able to switch between or swap services when contracts or performance requirements change. “
Another strong piece of advice listed in the report focuses on the importance of building out an ecosystem of partners who not only share your organization’s vision of the future but will ease deployment with geodiversity and interconnection. This as you might gather is music to our ears. The Cyxtera Marketplace allows customers to not only discover what services are offered in each of our 60+ data centers, but to connect with solution providers at each location.
At Cyxtera, we pride ourselves on more than just operational excellence. We wrote the book on making data centers smarter and more agile, with on-demand services provisioning and a software-programmable network for rapid extensibility and interconnectivity. And we’re doing it at scale. With a global network of data centers, learn what we can do for you.
Learn how to create a baseline for infrastructure strategy based on workloads rather than physical data centers. To download the report from Gartner, click here.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner Your Data Center May Not Be Dead, but It’s Morphing,David Cappuccio,Henrique Cecci,17th September 2020.
Views and opinions expressed in our blog posts are those of the employees who made them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Company. A reader should not unduly rely on any statements made therein.
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