22 I ICT TODAY
Is the Cloud or Fog Rolling In?
Keeping Up with the Ever-Changing Patterns
in Data Centers (includes 002 standard updates)
Another "year" and new forecasts abound for the data center market.
When not automatically popping up everywhere, these forecasts can
be found with a simple keyword search, resulting in an abundance
of diverse numbers and projections. They tell a similar story; the five
to ten year forecast on the data center market is all sunshine, with
compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) ranging from 6 to 9 percent.
Much like the weather in certain areas, to understand where the data
center market is headed all one needs to know are the past trends. Since
the introduction of the smartphone just 10 years ago, the need and
consumption of data has significantly grown year-over-year, leading
to a similar growth in the infrastructure to store and serve it. Looking
deeper, there have been changes in data center efficiencies and the
longer-term patterns of who manages that data and where it is stored.
By Jeff Silveira, CAE, RITP
As the data center
is to the cloud,
edge computing
is to the fog.
