February 24, 2022
The data center ecosystem is evolving and experiencing growth at all levels with activity focused heavily in the cloud, at the edge of the network, and increasingly, in cloud resources at the edge. Those old IT closets aren’t extinct, but they’re rapidly becoming a relic of the early rush to the edge.
When we surveyed data center professionals in 2019 as part of our Data Center 2025 update, more than half of those with edge sites said they expected to double those sites by 2025, and 1 in 5 predicted an increase of 400% or more. Now, as we reach the halfway mark on the road to 2025, a new survey indicates those ambitious forecasts were well-founded.
The latest research, which I encourage everyone to read for themselves, reinforces the 2019 projections and paints a picture of an industry simultaneously growing and changing to support an insatiable demand for computing, especially at the edge.
Survey participants expect the edge component of total compute to increase from 21% to 27% over the next four years and the public cloud share — which increasingly includes cloud resources at the edge — to grow from 19% to 25%. Not surprisingly, this mirrors a continued shift away from centralized, on-premises computing, which is projected to decline from 45% of total compute to 35%.