EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

MATT EDGLEY , DIRECTOR – TELEDATA

10 years ago , the big question was – cloud or colo ? The two were competing against each other . But as times have moved on , this idea of cloud vs . colo is often completely unsuitable . Some workloads are best suited to a colo environment and some are best in a cloud / elastic environment .

It ’ s about that hybrid approach and consulting with clients to provide the best ongoing solutions to their everchanging business needs .

So , the choice for the customer has moved on . Transformation is an ongoing process and what you need today isn ’ t necessarily what you will need in the future . Buyers are looking at data centres that can offer them agnostic hybrid options , which may involve a combination of services including physical hosting such as colocation , on-site IaaS and access to the big boys such as AWS , Azure and Google .

Customers don ’ t want to be locked in and they need to see that choice as

being available – if not for now , then for what may happen in the future . So , data centres that are able to offer that flexibility actually benefit from their end-users ’ adoption of cloud and other technologies .

Then there ’ s private cloud . Where do private cloud providers , or businesses that have the resource to build their own private cloud infrastructure , host their physical equipment ?

It has to live somewhere , as do all types of cloud solutions – so while the number of end-users coming to data centres for hosting may have reduced , the number of cloud hosting companies that need to take that space to provide the cloud services to the end-users has increased , so we are seeing a change in customer profiles .

This again , is where being agnostic and neutral is key for a data centre . As much as partnerships with colocation resellers in the early 2000s was important for data centres – a market which has now almost disappeared – these days , partnerships with CSPs and MSPs are even more important . In a trust-based supply chain where service impacts are high , cloud hosting firms and data centres need to work together now more than ever .

If there are data centre leaders out there that truly believe they are competing head-to-head with cloud operators , and that really don ’ t see the adoption of cloud services as a real opportunity ; and these same leaders are setting up their business model and value proposition to cloud-compete rather than cloudenable , then these same operators will be losing significant ground as data centres evolve with the wants and needs of their market . ◊

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