IDC has released what it lists out are the challenges that datacentres will face from 2015 to 2018. It paints a grim scenario where enterprises are unprepared to build and manage datacentres that are big data, secure and reliable. That’s the bad news.
 
The good news is that third-party service providers are ready to step in. IDC predicts that by 2018, external parties will own a quarter of all IT assets installed in organisations' server rooms and closets. This is reminiscent of datacentre outsourcing contracts of nearly two decades past. IDC does offer a caveat in that this outsourcing trend will pose major asset management and governance challenges.
 
"The key question for organisations is whether they have the insight, capital, and commitment to design, build, and operate datacentres for reliable and dynamic delivery of transaction, content serving, archiving, and analytic capacity on time, with no delays and no excuses to individuals and organisations around the world," said Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacentre & Cloud Research at IDC.
 
"For many the answer will be 'no!' They will rely increasingly on third parties to build, deploy, manage, and 'rent' IT capacity and store important information." 
 
The predictions from the IDC FutureScape for Datacentre are:
 

1. By 2016, 65 percent of organisations' infrastructure investments will target creation and expansion of 3rd Platform systems of engagement and insight, rather than maintaining existing systems of record.
2. In the next two years, 25 percent of all large and mid-sized businesses will confront significant power/cooling facilities mismatches with new IT systems, limiting them to using less than 75 percent of their physical datacentre space.
3. In the next two years, incompatible or immature IT asset management practices will prevent 80 percent of organisations from being able to take full advantage of converged and software defined IT solutions in their own facilities.
4. By 2016, hyperscale datacentres will house more than 50 percent of raw compute capacity and 70 percent of raw storage capacity worldwide, becoming the primary consumers/adopters of new compute and storage technologies.
5. By 2017, 60 percent of the datacentre-based IT assets that organisations rely on to conduct business and deliver services will be in colocation, hosting, and cloud data centres.
6. Over the next two years, over 60 percent of companies will stop managing most of their IT infrastructure, relying on advanced automation and qualified service partners to boost efficiency and directly tie datacentre spend to business value.
7. Over the next three years, 70 percent of large and mid-sized organisations will initiate major network redesigns to better align inter-datacentre and datacentre-to-edge data flows.
8. By 2018, third-party service providers will own a quarter of all IT assets installed in organisations’ server rooms and closets, posing major asset management and governance challenges.
9. By 2016, the top 20 providers of consumer and business as-a-service solutions will deploy broad spectrum, multi-datacentre security solutions.
10. By 2018, every organisation in data-intensive industries will have formal data ethics review processes and will publicise data control policies.

 
The audio replay of IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Datacenter 2015 Predictions Web conference is available here: http://bit.ly/IDCDataCenterFutureScape2015.