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Cloud growth can be perceived in more ways than one. Cloud computing is growing in terms of number companies that are adopting cloud and total number or workloads that are being shifted to cloud environment from onsite IT infrastructures.
Migration of Workloads to Cloud
Although there is a considerable volume of software workloads being moved to cloud the onsite enterprise IT is not shrinking at the comparable rate. There is a remarkable improvement in on premise data centers’ facilities that are marked by adoption of cutting edge technologies. However, one must admit that these legacy data center infrastructures have ceased to expand in size and capacity parameters.
These observations are based on the survey and opinions of IT executives, and managers who have been assigned tasks of managing enterprise data center facilities of critical organizations including manufacturing, banking, and retail trading.
It is hardly surprising that almost fifty percent of the respondents that are operating IT infrastructure facilities have confirmed that they are engaged in upgrading infrastructures and redesigning power and cooling facilities that form the significant portion of capacity planning initiatives.
There are efforts to compensate the demand by leveraging cloud services as well as consolidation of servers. It is also worth noting that a considerable chunk of respondents have agreed that they are looking forward to build new Data Centers in Cloud.
The results of these surveys confirm that in order to offset the additional demand, many organizations are leveraging third party service providers. These are the same organizations that have appreciated value of investments pertaining to on-site data center infrastructures that were made just before the beginning of 21st century.
Data Center Expansion and Upgrade
Thanks to cloud adoption strategies, many organizations have been able to get a bit of breathing time while handing the impact of data influx. There is considerable prudence in enhancing capacity and efficiency of the existing data centers rather than going for an entirely new data center infrastructure for catering to growing data processing demands of large corporate enterprises. In fact, a move to build large data center facility would not have been acceptable just about few years ago.
Modern IT executives are more inclined towards investing a small amount in upgrading the existing facility than pumping huge sum for creating an entirely new data center infrastructure. There is a greater need to extract as much workloads as possible from the current resources of data centers.
This explains the move to adopt colocation services, cloud computing, and processor upgrades for enabling enterprises to achieve more with less number of servers. These moves also reduce the stress on organizations to establish new sites and also save huge expenditure that is required to build entirely new facilities.
The surveys have also confirmed that there is a considerable quantum of organizations that have adopted an approach of moving lock stock and barrel to the cloud. One of the global news paper giants have begun moving all workloads to Amazon’s as well as Google’s cloud platforms from three colocation data centers.
The only exception is number of conventional systems, which are not possible to transfer to cloud and are being serviced by the colocation data center that exists only for supporting these legacy systems.
In case of one of the major technology vendor Juniper Networks, the company has shrunk its network of eighteen data centers that were owned and operated by the company to a single data center facility. The vendor has also adopted the approach of shifting majority of workloads to cloud similar to the corporate news conglomerate mentioned earlier. The single colocation facility is enabling its legacy workloads that are not possible to move to cloud.
Continuing with Established Infrastructure
It is also observed that instead of building newer facilities, many service providers are busy upgrading or expanding their existing data center facilities. It indicates that providers of data center facilities are reducing their expenditure for construction of new facilities but are not making any compromise with capacity expansion of their overall service offerings.
This leads us to believe that in spite of an apparent exodus of workloads to cloud, the importance of physical data center facilities has not eroded. Enterprise IT infrastructures and colocation centers are being leveraged by many organizations as established resources of managing critical and legacy workloads.
Server Colocation underlines the importance of owning a rack space without significant investment in on-premise facility. This can also free up IT workforce of the organization for more innovative projects. Colocation is also more reliable way to manage critical workloads.
From all these real life examples and the results of the survey we can conclude that over sixty percent of enterprises are adopting cloud computing, server virtualization, and optimized server performance to shrink its on-site data center footprint. Colocation as well as on site data centers are time tested and established resources for managing mission critical information and vital workloads.
