The total number of data centres around the world will peak at 8.6 million in 2017…

We live in the age of Big Data: the complex data sets that hold patterns, trends and valuable projections, beneficial to our society and business.  As the volume of data increases, we need much more sophisticated tools to analyse and evaluate what is in front of us and where to physically store it. Imagine an old-fashioned library which keeps receiving more and more books: what happens when the shelf space runs out? And how will we keep track of where all of the books are?

Our technology-based society is constantly growing and the volume of data generated all need to be housed somewhere. Data centres are a massive part of our information infrastructure, without which we would basically be like fish out of water. The Internet of Things and all online action is all about information transfer and capture. Whether it’s street cameras logging licence plates for the congestion charge or running powerful database driven websites, the acquired information needs to be stored in high-tech data centres.

What is Causing This Rapid Growth?

One main cause of the massive expansion in the number of global data centres is the shift from company’s internal IT resources to using large service provider’s infrastructures, requiring “mega data centres” to cope with all of the demand. To try to get an idea of the immensity of actual space such centres need, try to imagine this: “Worldwide datacenter space will continue to increase, growing from 1.58 billion square feet in 2013 to 1.94 billion square feet in 2018.” Still not visual enough?

Try THIS instead!  

As companies are looking for more flexible and scalable solutions, they are turning away from physical metal server space in their own buildings and joining managed hosting solutions. As business has become more malleable and less rigid, so the needs for limitless infrastructure have increased. There is generally not enough time and resources to make physical changes to servers as and when the need arises. Using a powerful cloud solution offers instant scalability and growth. This in turn means we need more and more powerful data centres.

It is predicted that Amazon, Microsoft and China will occupy 72.6% of all data centre space in the world by 2018. Imagine that.

What Does Data Centre Growth Mean For Your Business?

With all of the mountains of data piling up, and more websites going live online, the questions we have to ask is: how can we make sure that data transfer is as efficient as possible? All website owners will agree that speed is a crucial factor for their online businesses. To keep your website running at lightning speed you need hosting solutions with a global network of datacentres in multiple locations, to ensure the fastest possible path is always available and that bandwidth is not saturated. The UK2 Group currently operates on 25 data centres distributed around the world which offer secure and reliable hosting solutions with limitless bandwidth, millisecond-optimised delivery and cutting edge hardware.

In the data driven world we live in, downtime has to be a thing of the past. Ready for the switch to managed infrastructure?
Check out UK2’s amazing web hosting solutions today!