From a trend perspective, there is consensus that data center capacity will continue to grow steadily on a global scale. This has happened for several years already and is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. However, while much of the growth to date has been characterized by the build-out of hyperscale cloud and colocation facilities, the years ahead will see an increasing importance of edge and micro edge locations. This is being driven by the growth of IoT, gaming, mobile 5G, content distribution, cloud services, autonomous vehicles, and a myriad of other applications that require closer proximity to the compute. There are several reasons for this: Network latency needs to be extremely short, network bandwidth can be very expensive, and network complexity could become a limiting factor. But all three can be overcome by increasing computing power at the edge.
This accelerating growth in the data center market will undoubtedly result in some significant challenges that will need to be handled carefully in order to secure a reliable and fully functioning global IT infrastructure. There will be challenges with human resources — finding enough qualified people to design, build, operate, and maintain all the required new data center facilities. There will be technical challenges requiring significant integration efforts between the buildings themselves and the systems to be installed within. There will be increasingly tough “green” challenges — especially around energy efficiency — which will trigger the emergence of new technologies and new ideas. And there will be volume challenges, with the deployment of large numbers of edge and micro edge data centers requiring a high level of standardization, coordination, and new capabilities in remote management.