IDC: Digital transformation to drive future change in APAC data centers

By 2018, IDC expects that 35% of companies in data-intensive industries will adopt formal data center planning, sourcing, and governance processes.

In its latest Asia Pacific report titled "IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Datacenter 2017 Predictions – APeJ Implications" IDC highlights a range of maturing technologies within the data center that are essential for organizations seeking to digitally transform.

The analyst firm predicts that the future "DX Economy" will require a highly accurate, fully automated, lights-out data center that uses predictive analytics to reduce downtime.

"This discussion has been weighted heavily on the business aspects of digital transformation and tended to neglect the complexity of the technical datacenter environment," says Dr. Glen Duncan, senior research manager, Datacenter at IDC Asia/Pacific.

"There is now a perfect confluence of business and ICT trends creating the necessary alignment.

IDC APAC expects that by 2019, 25% of organizations' data center investments will be supporting next-gen contextual workloads such as Cognitive/AI, Machine learning, and Augmented Reality.

By next year, IDC believes only 20% of enterprises will deploy software-defined data centers on schedule.

Another prediction from IDC APAC, is that enterprises will react to changing data use patterns, with 45% of their ICT spend in 2018 a mix of colocation, hosted cloud, and public cloud data centers.

And, in three years, rack-level hyperconverged and hyperscale bundles will account for 30% of server/storage/network deployments, driving changes in power and cooling design.

"As organizations digitally transform, their underlying cloud and datacenter infrastructure must mature at the same rate and in parallel," says Cynthia Ho, Senior Research Analyst, Datacenter, IDC Asia/Pacific.

"If it doesn't, line-of-business and the IT department will be out of alignment. This will create tensions between the two areas and the larger the gap, the greater the tension," she explains.

"Apart from the shackling of the business, this will also contribute to the proliferation of shadow IT.