OPINION
By Kevin Kearns, CFO, Colt Data
Centre Services
www.coltdatacentres.net
Europe and Asia have the potential
to overtake the US and become
the data-centric empire
In times of trouble and great uncertainty, financial advisers
have long recommended the same course of action: buy
gold. Few investments are entirely risk-free, but those looking
for a safe bet could do a lot worse than investing in the
burgeoning data centre market.
Amid all the global uncertainty, the data centre sector
looks set to grow robustly for the foreseeable future, with
industry analysts Gartner predicting that investment will
rise from 0.3% this year, to 1.2% worldwide in 2018. This
growth is being powered by a worldwide hunger for new
services, including such data intensive applications as
advanced analytics, machine learning, robotics, and a host
of others.
Meanwhile, the migration of on-premises data and
workloads to the cloud is continuing to drive demand for
external data storage and compute facilities. The global
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which represents only one
part of the global cloud market, increased by an astonishing
31% in 2016, reaching US$22.1 billion.
This is obviously great news for data centre and cloud
services providers (CSPs) themselves, and their investors,
but it only tells part of the story. Even more significant than
the strong and continued growth in the data centre market
is the shift in the sector’s centre of gravity away from its
traditional stronghold in North America, towards other
markets in established and emerging economies.
While the US has never had a monopoly over cloud
and data centres, it has long been the de facto capital
of the Internet. This is the result of numerous factors
from its technology infrastructure, its predominance in
global technology firms, and its culture of investment and
innovation. But new developments in a number of areas,
from financial regulation to macroeconomic factors to new
technologies, mean that the greatest growth in the data
centre sector will be focused not in the US, but in markets
such as Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
Proximity matters
North America (for which read ‘the United States’) enjoys
a significant lead over other regions of the world when it
comes to the size of its data centre industry. Looking at
colocation alone, the US generated $14 billion of revenue
in 2016, compared to just under $12 billion for Asia and $7
billion in Europe.
www.networkseuropemagazine.com
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