Enterprises begin closing their data centers

The enterprise data center is fading away. In 2019 we expect to see a noticeable shift of enterprise data center workloads to multitenant data centers in the public cloud. Two forces are at play in this digital trend: Information processing is becoming a utility, and customers (and their data) are widely distributed. To operate more efficiently and derive more value from their data, enterprises are shifting to public cloud providers, who have massive bandwidth and strategically placed data centers. Think of it as value shifting from single houses to apartment complexes.

In effect, enterprise data centers will become virtual compartments in various multitenant public clouds and thus will be shut down except for their mainframe workloads. The mainframe workloads will migrate to specialized data centers that are heavily leveraged until they, too, eventually go away. We will see a lot of “lift and shift” in 2019, but the trend will play out over the next three to five years as cloud migration gives way to “built for cloud” replacements.

The decisions companies make in 2019 will determine how they fare in our evolving digital world. Taking these six digital trends into account will help to ensure that their digital transformation journeys continue to be successful.

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