White Paper

Executive Summary

The growing maturity of the cloud will generate significant business opportunities powered by converged IT solutions (compute/storage/network) driven by huge amounts of data generated by thousands, or even millions, of devices.  To take advantage of these opportunities, businesses will migrate their data to carrier-and-cloud-neutral data centers where they can ensure best price, best service and maximum agility by:

• Maintaining secure, fast connections to public clouds. Direct access to the main cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google) will be a must have, but vendor lock-in will always be a concern, so choice and ease of migration are key
• Building their own ecosystems – an increasingly sophisticated and flexible hybrid cloud solution using an array of networks, exchanges , cloud infrastructure and specialist service providers
• Transforming the business into a cloud service provider – establishing their own cloud services using open source cloud development partners

• Developing flexible data architecture; picking and choosing from an increasing range of software-defined infrastructure options
• Orchestrating a range of comparatively complex and overlapping mixed security solutions.
• Demanding the highest standards of efficiency and compliance at a data center level. This will involve talking less about m², kW and UPS, although the undercurrent will be towards denser processing, a smaller environmental footprint and more efficient power management
• Building a strategic partnership with their data center provider. The successful data center skillset will expand to include consultancy; guiding clients through the permanently evolving ecosystem , constantly looking for competitive advantages, thereby enabling enterprises to get maximum value from the data center and connected ecosystem.