Thanks to the internet of things (IoT), IT colocation is growing not at single, but double digits.
Launched by energy management company Schneider Electric and IT consulting firm BroadGroup, the first International Colocation Club brought together representatives from eight countries including Brazil, France and Russia.
The group found that despite shaky economies in certain regions such as France, colocation remained “a strong business with acquisitions still in play and further expansion planned both within Paris, and across a number of business cities in the country.”
This is largely a result of the growth in internet users and internet-enabled devices, which according to BroadGroup amounts to compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17 per cent and 27 per cent in 2013 and 2018, respectively. Meanwhile, video streaming service Netflix takes up more than a third of household bandwidth now in American households, at around 20 Gb per month.
Colocation centres are a type of data centres that provide space, power, cooling and physical security for the servers, storage and networking equipment of other companies, and also allow customers to rent equipment, space, and bandwidth.
With increasing demand for data centers, cloud and outsourcing, growth in colocation has reached as high as 16 per cent CAGR in Asia up to 2018.
“Cloud means that procurement is no longer the reserve of data center specialists, even property people or led by specific applications, but by a broader IT infrastructure and cloud strategy,” said Steve Wallage, managing director of BroadGroup Consulting in an official statement. “We are now seeing highly flexible or monthly deals and a move towards more dynamic on-demand offerings.”