Last year was one of mixed fortunes in the data center industry. The COVID pandemic, and the recessionary impact it brought in its wake, put a number of new builds on hold. On the plus side, a buoyant hyperscale cloud provider sector helped to counterbalance this unplanned for disruption, meaning that overall data center capex spend was up 2% globally according to independent analyst firm Dell’Oro.

The expectation for 2021 is that the whole sector will come out fighting, making up for last year’s shortfall with a raft of new builds. Deployment strategies will be further enhanced by a number of trends, not least the increasing centrality of AI and ML in supporting the facilities of the future.

Cloud has transformed the way enterprises handle compute over the past 10 years. It has also reshaped the data center sector, driving it to respond to new needs. The next 10 years promise equally radical cloud-driven change. The chances are we’ll see a much more data-centric, real-time, intelligent, hyper-decentralized cloud, made up of on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud models, with workloads distributed between the core and the new cloud edge. By necessity, we’ll see the emergence of a services layer designed to abstract away the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.

To better understand what the big data centre directions and destinations of 2021 will be, and the technologies that will enable them, we are bringing together a world beating panel of industry experts to engage in stimulating discussion. The virtual event will be introduced and chaired by Baron Fung, Research Director with the Dell’Oro Group, who will use it to outline some brand new findings.

Data centers will no doubt face major hurdles over the next 12 months as they continue to support remote working on a massive scale and enable huge increases in Internet usage. But the outlook will not be so tough for those who have a handle on what’s happening next.