It’s safe to say that 2016 has been a year full of surprises – but what will next year hold?
Data is being created and collected at a faster rate than ever before, and this rapid growth is only expected to continue. Therefore, the data centre industry is likely to evolve next year to meet the new storage needs of businesses.
With this in mind, we’ve taken a look at what 2017 might hold for the data centre industry:
- The cloud
Cloud solutions have become an increasingly popular choice for businesses, often due to their scalability and flexibility. These have become important requirements, particularly now that 25% of businessesplan to invest in big data over the next two years, and will need solutions that can handle large and rapidly changing amounts of data.
- Data centre security
The arrival of the new year means that the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will only be one year away. Coming into force in May 2018, these regulations will encourage a stricter enforcement of the data security measures within Europe. If companies don’t comply with these regulations, they may face extreme fines of up to €20 million, or 4% of global turnover.
Therefore, data centres and businesses alike will be looking to adjust their security measures in order to make sure that they don’t get on the wrong side of GDPR. In many cases, this will mean investing in disaster recovery solutions or looking for data storage solutions with strong physical and virtual security measures.
- Automation and machine learning
This year, we’ve seen data centres starting to embrace machine learning in order to become more efficient. In some cases, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have cut data usage by as much as 15%.
Automated processes can allow decisions to be carried out quickly with minimal processing power, so we are likely to see many more data centres taking advantage of this next year.
- A greener industry and smarter data centres
Greener thinking may be a common New Year’s resolution across the data centre industry in 2017. This year, The Independent reported that data centres now consume about 3% of the global energy supply, and this amount is expected to triple over the next decade.
Data centres across the world are now taking steps to become more energy efficient, from being powered entirely by renewable energy, to designing micro-outdoor data centres to save energy. We are likely to see more of these innovations next year as the data centre industry strives to become more environmentally friendly.
If you’ll be looking for a new data centre or colocation solutions next year,find out more about us here.
