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Current Filter: Cloud>>>>>Opinion> Will Public Cloud Kill the Data Centre? Editorial Type: Opinion Date: 06-2015 Views: 2112 Key Topics: Cloud Data Centres Hybrid cloud Security Key Companies: London Data Centre Key Products: Key Industries: Government | |||
By Roger Keenan, managing director of London data centre, City Lifeline
Technology experts send mixed messages. Some will state the data centre is dead due to businesses adopting cloud technology en masse, while research will show data centre growth for colocation has never been so fast and the industry is on an exponential upward curve due to the cloud. In practice, neither view is correct; the information and communication industries will just find a new balance, as they always have when faced with disruptive technology. Remote hosting is nothing new The combination of fast, cheap fibre and large scale virtualisation changed things. Once it became possible to combine servers with other users, virtualisation became the cost-effective business choice. Physical servers could be colocated in a data centre, optimised for the job, with the economies of scale implied by the concentration of resources. Once marketers understood the idea, the cloud was born. So does that mean all in-house data centres and their staff are doomed? Will all computing and data communications take place in huge cloud data centres owned by Amazon and Google and other giant US corporations? The birth of hybrid So this leads to the concept of hybrid cloud, where the constant workload is run in-house, or colocated to commercial data centres, but scalable data intensive tasks, like payroll, are sent to public cloud services when necessary. As the move from in-house data centres continues, the market for colocation in commercial data centre grows, and the core workload runs on an organisation’s own servers in a data centre while data spikes are offloaded. Security is a further issue, as it has been since the cloud, and remote hosting before it, first entered the business world. If an organisation’s critical data is on its own servers, either in-house or colocated in a commercial data centre, it is under the company’s own control. Once it enters the public cloud, it is not, no matter how strenuously the salesman may emphasis how trustworthy his employer is. Many organisations would be happy to run their payroll off-premise, but what of the blueprints for their latest software solution? So the balance between in-house data centre services, commercial external colocation data centres and public cloud changes. Business needs continue to fluctuate but the current state of the market shows a clear trend – long live the commercial data centre and long live public cloud. | |||
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