How Enterprise Data Center is Being Redefined The growing digitalization and data boom has attracted the interest of global cloud giants and investors as it is the need of the modern economy

In the recent past, there have been tectonic shifts in the way Indians produce and consume data. Whether it is the widespread Digital India initiative, gravitation towards cashless payments or the innovations being introduced by the burgeoning entrepreneurial ecosystem, the stakes have significantly risen for the organisations that rely on IT infrastructure and ecosystem. As an emerging economy with a growing population, India is expected to be one of the largest national data consumers in the near future. However, such wide-scale data production and consumption warrant cutting-edge facilities for its storage, management, and distribution. These workloads may also need to be distributed across public and private clouds, urban and distributed data centres, in order to ensure uniformity of IT protocols and ease of access for consumers. This shift, in itself, has generated the demand for redefining the enterprise data centre, as they need to become more reliable and scalable to meet increasing and variable requirements for their services.

The Technology of the Day

Several cutting-edge technologies of the present era are also contributing towards the need to redefine enterprise data centres. The emergence of cloud technologies has demonstrated a powerful mode of data generation, storage, and consumption. However, at present, Indian data centres are apparently grappling with their ability to support the data boom particularly within the limitations of existing IT budgets and the availability of scarce resources. Furthermore, since data generation has grown exponentially, owing to recent developments such as digitalization, IoT, AI and others, the legacy modus operandi of storing or computing data is no longer viable for the digital enterprise. Another significant challenge is the ability to scale-up connectivity via bandwidth while minimizing the costs.

Evolution of the Data Centres

These challenges have pushed enterprise data centres to adapt and evolve, significantly over the last decade. Owing to disruptions such as wearable technology, big data, and local IoT to cloud collection systems, enterprises have been able to unlock considerable business opportunity, simply by redefining and amending their existing data centres. In order to optimise the costs and minimize the growing pains of this transition, organisations have found innovative ways to transform. For instance, while in-house data centres were standard in the past, more enterprises are now migrating to the public cloud and developing hybrid IT models. Leasing capacity in co-location facilities on the lease is a growing option for organisations that may wish to avoid capital costs.

Figures

In fact, the growing prominence of third-party data centres is set to be a key trend in the Indian IT market. As a more flexible model, data collocation allows businesses to scale up their requirements and leaves them able to focus on their own core services and enables them also to access cloud services and architectures as necessary. According to 451 Research, the colocation and managed hosting a market in India could be worth USD 2 billion by 2019, a remarkable increase from USD 1.3 billion in 2016. The firm also estimates cloud computing-as-a-service to grow at 25per cent CAGR in the next four years.

Alternatives

Furthermore, when it comes to redefining the enterprise data centre, a CIO is presented with a number of alternatives. For instance, with the e-commerce boom and the growth of cloud in India, hyperscale data centres have been attracting attention in the nation. Initially, with the growth of e-commerce, data centres evolved to act as IT infrastructure hosts for online businesses. However, to accommodate a greater boom, data centres are now transitioning towards hyperscale. This also allows them to provide a seamless service, by offering an economy of scale while delivering capacity that is scalable, efficient and resilient. Enterprises, therefore, are able to ward off network bandwidth and capacity crunches and subsequently deliver a better experience to their customers, simply by taking their existing infrastructure to the cloud.

Established enterprises are also shifting attention on hosting hybrid clouds. This enables them to espouse the increase in network traffic, as the infrastructure connects two different clouds (public and private) and makes the transfer of data and application completely seamless. A host of factors have contributed to the growing need for hybrid IT. Firstly, the increasing cost of cloud, which started as a flexible model but gradually grew expensive, has been pushing enterprises to discover a more cost-effective alternative. Secondly, the need for efficient accumulation, storage, security and utility of data has been pressing upon the enterprises of today.

The Process

Managers of today must be able to quickly access and process data or the lag will result in increasing bottom-lines and missed business opportunities. Enterprises can further exercise identity-based user control and thus, resolve any hidden dependencies for storage for input and output. The model, furthermore, enhances the fault tolerance for enterprises, while enhancing its IT capabilities.

With the increasing internet usage, data centres are also gravitating towards decentralization. The world of computing has become more distributed, fuelled by the rise of IoT and mobile devices. Enterprises are increasingly utilizing distributed applications and working towards an edge computing deployment. Edge computing refers to computing capacity closer to where the data is being generated, thus eliminating the latency and network congestion otherwise required to send data to a central computing point.

In an upcoming scenario marked by advanced tech like driverless cars, augmented reality in retail and media, robotics and automation in manufacturing, edge computing is set to play a prominent role for the ambitious enterprises of today. In fact, as per Million Insights report, the global market for edge computing is set to be worth USD 3.24 billion by 2025. Another report by Gartner predicts that by 2022, half of the data generated by the enterprises will be processed outside traditional centralized data centres.

Indian as Potential Market

According to International Data Corp, India is ranked third as a market for public cloud services in the Asia Pacific, with an estimated spending worth USD 2.12 billion. Furthermore, Gartner predicts India will become the seventh largest data centre market in the world by end of this year, and in the Asia Pacific it is second only to China. The growing digitalization and data boom has attracted the interest of global cloud giants and investors. Alibaba Cloud has recently renewed its focus on India, discovering significant business opportunities as the digital transformation is expected to contribute USD 154 billion to India's GDP. As digitalization seeps into the very fabric of India, more businesses are likely to outsource their IT infrastructure requirements and redefine their existing data centres.