“ THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A ROLE FOR THE MULTI- TENANT DATA CENTRE TO PROVIDE ENTERPRISES WITH SERVICES THAT DON ’ T FIT WITH THE STANDARD FLAVOURS OF THE HYPERSCALE OFFERINGS .
E D I T O R ' S Q U E S T I O N
MICHAEL WINTERSON , MANAGING DIRECTOR , EUROPEAN DATA CENTRE ASSOCIATION ( EUDCA )
In today ’ s fast-moving environment , with drivers such as Digital Transformation and the impact of AI , the CIO must make fundamental decisions around the proper deployment of infrastructure .
We ’ ve seen over the past 40 years – starting with mainframes , through the advent of the client-server space and up to cloud and the Internet – that technology is always more efficient at scale . Consequently , centralisation has been a fundamental feature of
“ THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A ROLE FOR THE MULTI- TENANT DATA CENTRE TO PROVIDE ENTERPRISES WITH SERVICES THAT DON ’ T FIT WITH THE STANDARD FLAVOURS OF THE HYPERSCALE OFFERINGS .
technology ever since . AI too , in the way it is currently designed , is fundamentally better as a mutualised service .
To a certain extent , CIOs will be compelled to centralise , but they will still have a multi-cloud environment . They will still have certain things that they consider sacrosanct to their business , personal information ( PI ), their data , their customer data , their private business operations , perhaps even a technology running on a factory floor . There may also be geographical issues for data for some territories that will require specific measures too .
Businesses can centralise , and still have the Edge Computing issue , in that certain things must live nearer to the business , the user , or the stakeholder . Therefore , businesses will be in a multicloud environment and may have a very complicated global network , a very complicated Zero Trust security system and will be constantly connecting a variety of technologies together and distributing them across their user base – be that local or global .
To achieve that , there will always be a role for the multi-tenant data centre to provide enterprises with services that don ’ t fit with the standard flavours of the hyperscale offerings . Every enterprise is consuming technology in the shape or form factor that fits their business , not the way the technology companies want to sell it .
We must stop assuming that we are going towards a monolithic cloud . Every enterprise that has tried to dedicate itself to one model of cloud has generally failed and is reversing as fast as it can several years later . A vanilla solution does not solve all problems .
Concerning the question then , it is not so much how to prepare for this proportion of market share , rather this is a rebalancing that is going on , but a rebalancing in a high period of growth . That means the whole pie is growing , and every slice is critical . No slice is likely to disappear but rather grow at different rates according to demand .
Businesses may reallocate where they invest , or their choice might be in a slower-growing section of the market , but still , the whole market is going to grow , with benefits for CIOs in terms of choice .
This is not a zero-sum game .
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