Will Data Centers Become Obsolete?
A data center is a facility that centralizes an organization's IT operations and hardware for the purposes of storing, processing, and distributing data and applications. Data centers are essential to the stability of everyday operations because they store the most important and sensitive assets of a business. As a result, every organization's priority includes ensuring the security and dependability of data centers and the information they house.
However, the traditional data center is quickly becoming obsolete due to the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and new demands for bringing applications closer to their users. The traditional data center has proven to be disadvantageous compared to the new technology available today.
Differences between the Traditional Data Center and a Cloud based
Here are 6 differences between the traditional data center and a cloud based data center:
Scalability
In contrast to the cloud, where extra resources may be rapidly and readily spun up as needed, a data center's resource scalability is restricted by the infrastructure that the organization has to be actively obtained and deployed.
Flexibility
In a physical data center, resource flexibility is limited by the need to acquire, provision, or update appliances; however in the cloud, a customer can spin up or take down resources quickly to meet business needs.
Cost
Maintaining a data center is more expensive than a cloud-based one. Data centers require organizations to pay full price for all of their infrastructure as compared to in the cloud, resources can be shared, and cloud service providers can take advantage of economies of scale.
Availability
In a data center, an organization has complete control over their infrastructure, which can be good or bad. In the cloud, availability is protected by service level agreements, which may provide better guarantees than an organization can in-house.
Security
In the cloud, the cloud service provider is responsible for securing part of an organization’s infrastructure stack and is likely more practiced at doing so. Within a data center, security is limited to what is accessible in person or dependent on the level of security invested in the infrastructure.
Accessibility
In a data center, the organization has complete control over the systems that it deploys and uses but in the cloud, the organization is limited to what is offered by the service provider.
Conclusion
Today, almost all businesses host at least a portion of their infrastructure in the cloud. This is because using cloud data centers has many benefits over using a physical data center. Future advantages of the traditional data center will be limited due to cloud services, the IoT, and other advances. The typical data center is now only used as a legacy holding area for systems that are most economically efficient on-site or for extremely particular services that cannot be serviced elsewhere.