industry news
US ACCOUNTS FOR ALMOST HALF OF ALL MAJOR CLOUD AND INTERNET DATA CENTRES
New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group
shows that the US now accounts for 46 per
cent of major cloud and Internet data centre
sites. The next most prominent locations are
China and Japan, with seven per cent and
six per cent respectively.
The three leading countries are then
followed by Australia, Singapore, Germany,
UK and Brazil, each of which accounts for
3-5 per cent of the total. The research is
based on an analysis of the data centre
footprint of 17 of the world’s major cloud
and Internet service firms, including the
largest operators in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS,
search, social networking and e-commerce.
In aggregate the companies now have over
230 major data centre sites.
On average each of the 17 firms had
14 data centre sites. The companies with
the broadest data centre footprint are the
leading hyperscale cloud providers – AWS,
IBM and Microsoft. Each has 40 or more
data centre locations with at least two in
each of the four regions – North America,
APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Google,
Oracle and Rackspace also have a notably
broad data centre presence. The remaining
firms tend to have their data centres focused
primarily in either the US (Apple, Twitter,
Salesforce, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo) or
China (Tencent, Baidu). Previously Alibaba
also was focused mainly in China but it has
now opened data centres in the US, Hong
Kong and Singapore.
‘Given that explosive growth in cloud
usage is a global phenomenon, it is
remarkable that the US still accounts
for almost half of the world’s major data
centres, but that is a reflection of the
US dominance of cloud and Internet
technologies,’ said John Dinsdale, a chief
analyst and research director at Synergy
Research Group.