The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry. Here’s a look at the insights from Sean Iraca of Digital Realty.
SEAN IRACA of Digital Realty
Sean Iraca is vice president of service enablement at Digital Realty, the leading provider of wholesale data centers and technology real estate. Sean is an accomplished, passionate management professional with experience in driving adoption of emerging technologies, and a frequent speaker at industry events. Prior to joining Digital Realty, Sean was senior director of cloud innovation at Equinix. He previously served in a number of sales and marketing roles at Verizon Business.
Here’s the full text of Sean Iraca’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: Discussion of industry trends is dominated by the rise of the cloud computing model. How has this cloud-driven disruption impacted the broader data center industry? What are the pros and cons?
Sean Iraca: The majority of enterprise companies are in some stage of developing or implementing a cloud strategy, and more often than not it is a multi-cloud strategy. That said, enterprises are also finding that migrating to the public cloud can be challenging. Issues arise around legacy applications that are not directly portable, and there are still data privacy, security and control concerns. As a result, the majority of enterprises are adopting a hybrid IT model and/or private cloud strategy which bodes well for the colocation industry.
Data Center Frontier: There has been a lot of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity recently in the data center industry. How are these M&A deals influencing the development of the data center industry? Are we likely to see more M&A activity?
Sean Iraca: There used to be more of a straightforward demarcation between providers’ wholesale versus retail services, but as a result of customer requirements and buying behaviors, those lines are becoming blurred. We are seeing the need for a more diverse and robust portfolio that allow customers to scale and grow over time, future proofing their IT infrastructure. Through this consolidation, data center providers now have the ability to fulfill customer needs from small footprints, even single cabinets, all the way up to multi-megawatt deployments.
Data center consolidation and migration to the cloud will continue to gain ground throughout 2017 and beyond. As we consolidate our global footprint and bring together our traditional scale offering with our highly interconnected sites throughout the world, Digital Realty is well positioned to capture the continued growth driven by cloud, IoT and mobility.
It is estimated that 5 billion devices will be connected by low power wide area networks by 2022. That is expected to drive 4.7 times more traffic than the average 4G connection. With this, businesses will have to re-architect to support the processing and storage needs either with cloud providers or in 3rd party data centers such as ours. Access to networks and other providers will be key along with the ability to scale at the Edge.
Data Center Frontier: The largest cloud platforms are seeking to deploy data center capacity at an accelerated rate. What has this meant to the supply chain for data center delivery?
Sean Iraca: Cloud service providers are evolving their architectures and infrastructures to support the high growth and performance demands, resulting in larger colocation demands across all of the architectural layers of their infrastructure. This is blurring the traditional lines between scale and colocation, creating net-new opportunity for datacenter providers
Additionally, as enterprises look to leverage the advantages of cloud-based services, infrastructure that has traditionally been hosted in basements is being redeployed in colocation facilities that provide the security and close proximity required to utilize cloud services. This is changing the way customers are utilizing datacenter infrastructure to help transform their IT infrastructure and there is increased reliance on cloud computing. As IT adoption turns cloud from an option to a critical asset, this is driving increased requirements for secure, high performance and reliable access to those cloud environments.
See the entire Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable for insights from additional executives and topical stories on the latest data center trends.