Whether an organization starts out with a modest, on-premises IT infrastructure or uses a public cloud provider to meet its data and networking needs, it will eventually reach a point where that solution is no longer viable.

If you’ve been listening to industry chatter, then you’ve probably heard murmurs about the death of the data center.

If you’re like me, you travel a fair amount for work, and that means you spend time sitting in airport concourses waiting for your flight, waiting for your flight to be rescheduled, and waiting for information on alternate flights when your flight is cancelled.

In April, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report to Congress on the current status of the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) — the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) directive to optimize and consolidate data centers to deliver better services to the public while increasing return on investment (ROI) to taxpayers.

There are pros and cons to everything, and colocation is no exception. Though it may be a relatively new concept to the data center world, it definitely wasn’t born yesterday. Other industries have been building their business models around the idea of colocation for quite some time.

Sustained demand fueling positive outlook for data center investment market contributing factors include expansion in cloud companies and widespread reliance on data centers.

Data centers are more critical to the operation of our businesses than they have ever been in the past, and the criticality increases every day.

The use of colocation data centers by business and industry to store, manage, and exchange data has grown tremendously over the past decade and is likely to continue due to the convenience and economic advantages such facilities provide.

Gartner is predicting that enterprise data centers will soon be obsolete, and what’s to come may be surprising to many.