How Data Center Growth will Propel the Industry?

A massive amount of data is being generated everyday, thus we saw a rapid growth in the data center industry. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80 per cent of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premises data centers with the current trend of moving workloads to colocation, hosting and the cloud leading them to shut down their traditional data center. Also, the Dataquest estimates India Data center market is pegged at Rs 35,000 crore for 2018.

As we look to the future, and as technology evolves, so the data center, both in use and implementation. We spoke to Sanjay Motwani, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Raritan, A brand of Legrand to understand the Indian data center industry and its challenges.

New opportunities for the Indian data center industry

As businesses thrive in their digital transformation, data will drive the growth of the economy in 2019 as well. In the current scenario, enterprises require data centers to be more agile, scalable and flexible. Gartner predicts the worldwide spending on digital transformation and IT services to cross USD 3.8 trillion and data center systems to cross USD 195 billion in 2019. The market in India is expected to grow at 23% to 25% and cross $7 billion by 2020. According to Gartner, sectors like Telecom, IT, BFSI, E-commerce and Government have fuelled the rise of intelligent data centers going forward we see these sectors being a major contributor in the growth story of data centers in India.

In order to meet the current demands of data proliferation and data center scalability, there is a need of integration of both cloud and physical solutions. In 2019, security of the data both at the organization and national level will require most attention and investment by both public and private entities. Security of the physical rack at the data center especially citizen’s data has to be ensured. In the coming year, we will see a steady growth of both hardware and security solutions market at the data center side. Moreover, we see there is a huge demand of state-wise data center. Smart Cities will further augment the demand for data centers.

The challenges and solutions

One of the biggest challenges would be with data localization, that will lead to increased costs for public cloud companies as they might need to expand data center capacity to fit customer data currently hosted outside India besides dealing with infrastructure and connectivity challenges such as high power costs and the need to get various permits. The volume increase in data will require data centers to become more agile and efficient to cater to this exponential growth. Therefore, the biggest challenge for enterprises would be the integration and management of hybrid cloud solutions.

In order for Indian data centers to compete globally in the new “Data center as a service environment” the ability to scale up quickly and optimize costs is critical. Hence, there is a need for faster government clearances for data center projects and incentives to businesses for building efficiencies.

New technologies like mobility and wearables are demanding increasing latency. Due to the changing nature of data center architectures, it is prudent to have enough resources that can monitor the changing nature of data center environments. Data centers can deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning at the entry level to avoid human error and reduce the cost of human labour. Also, the amount of time to train a pre-programmed robot as compared to a human labour is much less and cost-effective. Hence with IT automation, data centers can reduce people dependencies which have also minimized the chances of error.

The next step

Organizations of all sizes will need to invest in agile data center solutions that are scalable, flexible and adhere to the highest global standards of security. Keeping operational costs and efficiencies optimal will be critical as data centers strategies evolve and grow.

When there is an ardent need to increase storage, vertical expansion is the best solution, it maximizes the existing space by providing more computing power in less cost per square foot. We need to optimise the existing capacity in terms of space and more compute power which is more cost effective in the long run. There is a need to vertically expand data centers by adopting 3 phase iPDUs. By bringing 3-phase power to the racks, power distribution is extended with more compute power reaching to the individual rack and cabinets, without undertaking any major structural changes in the data center.

With respect to security, the outlook has to change as the technology used on the network and the behaviour of the device on the network are not the only vulnerable areas for data theft. Today the infrastructure (UPS, PDU, Air-conditioning etc.) in a DC is also connected on the network. In the past, the security aspect has been focussed largely on networks and compute environment - and rightfully so. However, going forward in 2019 the behaviour of the equipment need to be closely examined.

Impact of data localization, digitization, AI, IoT & edge on data centers

Data localisation has opened up avenues for data center solution providers, along with security solutions market as most of the data in banking, e-governance, digital businesses are citizen/customer-centric. There are a lot of players like Master Card, Amazon, Google, Alibaba to name a few. With regards to digitization, we are seeing it getting a major thrust by the government of India launching e-governance services and opening up AADHAAR data centers across the country. Artificial Intelligence will still need some time for largescale adoption by data centers in India in the coming year.

Colocation and edge will thrive: The need to secure growing volumes of dispersed data generated at edge locations will drive enterprises to set up and operate data vaults in multiple colocation facilities. Enterprises will double their IT asset spending in edge locations and nearby colocation facilities versus core data centers to deliver digital services to local users and things. Colocation datacentre market to reach USD 50 billion by 2019.

Edge will scale out: With the decentralization of IT workload, smaller data centers will be built in regional locations to bring services and compute closer to the customer. This change along with IoT devices collecting data have shorter backhaul and less latency. With enterprises increasingly adopting IoT, collecting massive amounts of data at the edge, data centers will continue to scale, but they will scale out, not up.