By Ian Williams, Divisional Director, Data Centres & Networks, Indigo
The current demand of Data Centres
A consequence of businesses becoming more tech-driven and consumers demanding more streaming services is a boom in data centres. Valued at $187.35b in 2020, the global market is projected to reach $517.17 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2021 to 2030, according to Allied Market Research.
The data centre’s role in satisfying a worldwide appetite for more bandwidth and connectivity is also significant. A report by Market Research Future into data centre structured cabling, looking at trends by product types such as copper wire and fibre optic, predicts that the industry will be worth $6.72b by 2030, with a 12.32% CAGR throughout the 10-year forecast period.
Everything as a service
What data centre growth reflects is a fundamental change in the way IT services are delivered and consumed. Businesses are moving their infrastructure and applications to hyperscale public clouds from the tech giants, or turning legacy infrastructure into private clouds that emulate the agile capabilities of public clouds.
They are outsourcing more infrastructure to colocation facilities, moving away from inhouse servers and stacks. Driving it all is the pursuit ‘everything as a service’, making IT easier to manage and more predictable to cost. By 2025, 40% of newly procured premises-based compute and storage will be consumed as a service, up from less than 10% in 2021, according to Gartner.
A similar evolution has transformed consumer habits, with streaming services for film and music replacing solid state media. New entertainment business models as well as the explosion in social media are all enabled by data centres that provide the scale and resilience to deliver global services, 24/7.
An emerging digital economy is also changing the way traditional sectors function. Data centres are becoming hubs for healthcare, education and other vital public services, as well as helping established businesses like travel and media reinvent themselves in the 21st century.
Future growth guaranteed
Further fuelling the growth of the sector is a new wave of technology. What the World Economic Forum calls Industry 4.0 – which includes analytics, AI, automation and IoT (Internet of Things) – relies on the scale and compute power of data centres to make them viable. And the exponential growth in data is similarly enabled by racks of virtualised storage in global data centres.
Demand for more bandwidth is synonymous with data centre growth. It is driving investment in structured cabling inside facilities that are increasingly used as interconnection points. As internet companies shift their strategies, from generating demand to generating supply and investing in subsea cabling, data centres will become even more important, providing a bridge into backhaul networks in different continents.
At the same time the evolution of edge computing, bringing compute power closer to machines and devices that generate data, will see the growth of micro data centres. Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and the rollout of 5G will advance this trend, enabling innovative low latency services to flourish outside of traditional data centres
If you want to know more, you may also be interested in our Data Centre eBook: “How to design and maintain fit-for-purpose data centres”
To learn more about Indigo Data Centre Services, visit our solutions page.