Is the data center dead?

Gartner predicts that 80% of all companies will shut down their traditional data center by 2025. Is it really going so fast? Let's have a look at what our customers think.

Dave Cappuccio, who writes for Gartner, predicts that by 2025 80% of all companies will choose to close their traditional data center compared to only 10% now.

Which trends do we notice

There is absolutely no doubt that the popularity of Cloud is increasing every year. In 2016, 16% of our customers did already pick one or more services from our cloud services.

This rose to a percentage of 21% in 2017. It is clear that there is a distinctive need among our customers (1 out of 5) to switch to a service-oriented strategy for certain matters, rather than to continue investing in traditional IT -architecture.

We are once again seeing an increase in these figures this year. Although at the moment we only have the figures for the first semester of 2018, we can say with certainty that we have already reached the milestone of 23%.

We saw the amount of cloud customers double in just 3 years from 9% in 2014 to 21% in 2017. 

For obvious reasons we do not have figures from customers who do not purchase cloud applications from EASI. But, we know for a fact some of them have those services implemented through a different cloud provider. Therefor, the numbers could be a lot higher.

Where is this evolution coming from?

Continuing to invest in the management of a data center is reaching its limits. In part this is due to the increasing demand for interconnect services, cloud providers, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) services.

Ready to ditch the data center?

We would not go that far. Our customers are not representative for the entire market. These companies purchase at least one cloud service from us. Many are still far away from completely abandoning or dismantling their own local data center. Often because they have very specific needs or work with services that can not be supported anywhere.

In his article Cappucio also writes the following:

"The role of the traditional data center is being relegated to that of a legacy holding area, dedicated to very specific services than can not be supported elsewhere, or supporting those systems that are most economically efficient on-premises."

That is why we think - based on our own figures and experience - that we are going to a 50/50 situation in 2025.

50% of the companies will effectively shut down their data center in the long term. The other 50% is evolving towards a hybrid situation. In doing so, they still prefer to have certain things on premise, but they make full use of the cloud for other services.

In short, we believe that the traditional data center 'with all assets 100% on premise' is definitely doomed in the end.

Is the Cloud for you?

Chances are that your company can benefit from it. It often comes down to identify the needs. A good service partner can help you create a flexible infrastructure and deliver the assets to monitor and manage it well afterwards.

Are you struggling with new developments, just like many other organizations? Do you need for workloads to be accessible from multiple locations or do you want to rethink the placement of certain outward-facing applications based on network latency, customer population clusters and geopolitical limitations (such as GDPR). Don't lose focus on customer experience in this process. Feel free to contact us without obligations. Thanks to our pragmatic approach, we can quickly examine which solution works best for you.

Or start small. And check out the inspirational article 'The path to the cloud' written by my colleague Cédric.