Both cloud and colocation service providers have experienced consistent growth over the last few years, but new demand drivers created by the pandemic are accelerating long-term data centre capacity expansion plans, noted the Cloud & Colocation Data Centre report
Accelerated by the demand created by the pandemic, globally data centres are set to increase capacity by 20 million square feet in 2021, according to Omdia’s latest Cloud & Colocation Data Centre Building Tracker report.
The top 35 Cloud and Colocation service providers, in the second half of 2020, opened 10 million square feet of data centre despite the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Cloud & Colocation Data Centre report.
“Both cloud and colocation service providers have experienced consistent growth over the last few years, but new demand drivers created by the pandemic are accelerating long-term data centre capacity expansion plans”, noted the Cloud & Colocation Data Centre report and added that a Microsoft website post said the technology company expects to open 50 to 100 data centres per year for the foreseeable future.
Approximately 51 per cent of the new capacity was brought online by colocation service providers and 48 per cent by cloud service providers, it added.
49 per cent of colocation using respondents indicated that the pandemic has led them to accelerate their use of colocation services, underscored the Cloud & Colocation Data Centre report citing separate survey findings.
“Cloud and colocation service providers have rather different building schedules. Colocation providers are usually right on the money opening data centres as scheduled, which is a function of meeting customer demand. Cloud data centre build cycles, on the other hand, can span anywhere from 12 months to 30 months, and occasionally longer”, noted Alan Howard, principal analyst in the Cloud and Data Centre Research Practice at Omdia.
“Colocation of course, is a critical piece of the puzzle as enterprises of all kinds need not just rack capacity for IT infrastructure, but also the broad interconnection capability needed to reach their multi-cloud providers and partners”, Howard said and added that this a requirement of many enterprises for their digital transformation initiatives.
Also read:DigiYatra: A paperless journey experience for domestic air travellers
Do Follow: CIO News LinkedIn Account | CIO News Facebook | CIO News Youtube | CIO News Twitter
