A recent blog post by Gartner analyst Dave Cappuccio offers a startling prediction: by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center, vs. 10% that have already shut down data centers to date. Cappuccio backs that prediction by identifying the evolutionary changes in how workloads are processed on business needs and not physical constraints. In other words, the drive towards digital transformation is shifting processing priorities to the cloud, making the traditional data center less relevant for conducting business.
The rapid demise of the enterprise data center directly correlates to the rapid growth of the cloud, where many workloads are migrating to and shifting where compute is being done. This effectively limits the importance of the traditional data center. However, that shift to the cloud comes with some unique challenges that many organizations are struggling to resolve. For example, cloud service providers (CSPs), or hyperscalers, are encountering an exponential increase in data generation from their clients, which in turn is forcing CSPs to grow their infrastructure at unprecedented rates.