EDITOR’S QUESTION
automated warehouses, home
automation, facial recognition, speech
recognition and hundreds of other
applications. All of this has led to an
explosion of data. Genomic data, for
example, is said to be doubling every
seven months.
Data centres everywhere are the
beneficiaries as all this data needs to
be stored somewhere. As the growth
in stored data outstrips the capacity of
on-premises facilities, organisations are
moving their data storage and processing
to either public or private clouds, both of
which fuel the growth in European data
centres. Gartner predicts that by 2025,
80% of enterprises will shut down their
on-premise data centres in favour of
outsourcing to third-party data centres.
DAVID FRIEND, CO-
FOUNDER AND CEO,
WASABI TECHNOLOGIES
he last couple of
years have seen
record investment in
European data centres
and according to a
December 2019 report
by DLA Piper, we can anticipate a further
rise in investment of between 10–29%
over the next two years. The data centre
market in Europe has been on a tear for
more than 20 years, but growth has been
accelerating in recent years as the role
of data has been shifting from one of
transaction processing to one of strategy
and insight. Transactions are important
of course – we all go to ATMs to take
out cash, for example – but increasingly
being able to analyse large bodies of
historical data are leading to behavioural
insights which allows organisations to
innovate around customer requirements.
Today, enterprises recognise the value
T
30
Issue 14
of data and how it can be mined for
strategic advantage.
A good example of how thinking about
data has changed in recent years is
the automobile industry. With all the
major European automakers launching
semi-autonomous vehicles, traditional
automobile technology is now taking a
back seat to data acquisition and analysis.
All these new vehicles are bristling with
cameras, radars and sensors of all kinds.
They produce terabytes of data every
time one gets in the car. This can provide
better and more detailed maps of the car’s
environment, they provide greater insight
into how the driver interacts with the
vehicle and they can literally learn how to
drive better by analysing past usage.
Data is revolutionising nearly every
industry, from drug discovery to
Over the next few years, the amount
of data and the resulting demand for
capacity will likely accelerate even more
as the adoption of 5G gains pace. 5G
offers enormous data throughput and it
is a certainty that someone will come
along and find a way to use all that
bandwidth. The resulting flood of data
from municipal, business and residential
customers will again have to be stored in
third-party data centres.
GROWTH
HAS BEEN
ACCELERATING
IN RECENT YEARS
AS THE ROLE
OF DATA HAS
BEEN SHIFTING
FROM ONE OF
TRANSACTION
PROCESSING
TO ONE OF
STRATEGY AND
INSIGHT.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com