Within 10 years most medium-to-large companies, including the largest enterprises in the world, will have closed their internal data centers and moved all their computing to large colocation/IaaS centers run by companies like Amazon AWS and IBM, writes Wikibon Co-founder and CTO David Floyer in his latest Wikibon Alert, “Mega-Datacenters are the Future”. In his vision, today’s internal data centers will be replaced with control centers at which the internal IT team will run an expanded IT infrastructure that will include its legacy core business applications plus new cloud-based applications and Big Data analysis that combines internal data with data from external Internet and Internet-of-things sources. All of the applications and data, and all of the infrastructure supporting them, however, will reside not in company data centers but in Mega-datacenters such as the Switch SuperNAP in Las Vegas.

“The current topology and organization will not sustain the potential opportunities for exploiting IT, even in the largest enterprises of the world,” Floyer writes. “Unless a new topology is aggressively adopted, line-of-business executives will go their own way and adopt cloud-based services.”

He cites multiple reasons that this transition is inevitable and that leading CIOs should start migrating their entire data centers to carefully selected IaaS providers that offer the specific services, including security and compliance audits if appropriate, that meet their needs. These include dramatic, in some cases order-of-magnitude, cost savings in communications, hardware costs, infrastructure management, and equipment, the advantages of using PaaS offerings like Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and IBM’s BlueMix, and the often superior security that these megacenters provide.

Moving the IT infrastructure and company data to a cloud-based megacenter also allows users to mitigate the significant problem of moving Pbytes of data across the network to support Big Data analysis. And it solves the problem of moving today’s highly stove-piped IT organizations forward into the software-defined infrastructure future.

Mega Datacenter Topology, via Wikibon

Floyer concludes that “CIOs and CXOs should aggressively adopt a mega-datacenter strategy that fits their business objectives within their industry. Enterprise IT should exit the business of assembling IT infrastructure to run applications and the business of trouble-shooting ISV software issues. The focus on IT should move to positioning the enterprise to exploit the data avalanche from the Internet an industrial Internet and enable real-time analytics.”

Floyer’s full report, like all Wikibon research, is available without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to add comments and questions to published research, publish their own tips, Professional Alerts and white papers, and participate in Wikibon research.

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