Hyperscale transition
Cisco published its findings in its seventh annual Cisco Global Cloud Index report. As covered by Computer Weekly, it predicted that hyperscale data centres will account for 53 percent of all datacentre servers by 2021. Accordingly, traffic within the datacentres will quadruple over the same period.
With consumers and businesses both embracing cloud services, the demand for hyperscale facilities will surge over the coming years. Consumers are now accustomed to a digital life in the cloud, uploading massive amounts of data to social networks and media streaming services each day. This will contribute to a tripling in the global volume of cloud datacentre traffic over the next five years.
Businesses too are benefitting from cloud software to improve collaboration, increase efficiency and host analytics platforms. Cisco predicted that enterprise applications will account for 73 percent of all datacentre workloads by 2021, an increase from 24 percent in 2016.
Growth in this sector is led by compute instances, at 24 percent of enterprise workloads. This is closely followed by collaboration software with a 23 percent share.
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This all amounts to good news for current hyperscale datacentre operators. Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are the current leaders in the cloud computing market. They’re not the only options though – Cisco’s research identified a total of 24 “hyperscale” operators across the globe. Collectively, they will operate 628 datacentres by 2021, up from 338 in 2016.
“The increasing need for data center and cloud resources from both the business and consumer service perspective has led to the development of large-scale public cloud data centers called hyperscale data centers,” said Cisco. “Hyperscale cloud operators are increasingly dominating the cloud landscape. The hyperscale operator might own the data center facility, or it might lease it from a colocation/wholesale data center provider.”
Data demand
Data analytics and the Internet of Things are expected to grow the most rapidly in the enterprise segment. Emerging technologies are a particular focus for businesses as they transition their services to the cloud. Not every company succeeds at making the switch though.
Cisco warned that poor integration with existing legacy technologies remains a stumbling point for many cloud deployments. Moving to the cloud can help companies to digitally transform but successful operation can require a new set of skills.
Security’s also a common concern as many businesses are inexperienced at maintaining hyperscale compute infrastructure. Although the cloud is coming, enterprises shouldn’t rush their deployments in an attempt to keep up with the crowd.
