Top 10 Lists: Cloud-Heavy Predictions Spell Opportunity

By Himanshu Patel, APC by Schneider Electric

Despite the information technology upheaval implicit in most “Top 10” lists from IT analysts and publications, a good chunk of that upheaval actually spells new opportunities for solution providers. The recent “10 Data Center Predictions for 2013” from CRN is no different in that there is plenty of opportunity to see in its list.

I won’t repeat the predictions here, because it’s a worthwhile read, but several of them are heavy on the trends of cloud computing, virtualization, and data center consolidation. To quote CRN’s overview, administrators will have to “wrestle with new threats and constraints to operations, including the BYOD (bring your own device) wave, the need for more and ever more bandwidth, and that ever-present cloud.”

Yes, the big, borderline scary-sounding cloud. Cloud computing can seem intimidating to data center solution providers because ostensibly, it’s all about users tapping into computing resources as a service rather than deploying them on premise. This might seem to spell an end to many small to mid-sized data centers that traditionally provided a steady stream of demand for solution providers.

Take a deeper look though, and you’ll see that the cloud does not eliminate the data center. It is changing the data centers, however, and the technology needed to manage them.

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