Some time back Gartner proclaimed "The Data Centre is Dead". Gartner was clear that the days of the traditional enterprise-owned data centre serving as the sole location to source IT services were waning.

According to Statista, in 2021, the US had over 2,670 data centres. China was a distant 4th place with 416 data centres.

Should companies still own their own data centres - co-located or on their own private property? Large banks with deep pockets will argue "yes" and part of this can be attributed to the risk posture their industries need to adopt. For other industries, its as much an economic as it is an operational issue.

Haji Munshi, Group CEO of Cloud Kinetics, joins PodChats for FutureCIO to discuss:

1.       Reportinker says COVID-19 has been a catalyst for data centre buildout in Asia. It didn’t differentiate though between individual company-owned as opposed to businesses that offer data centre services. 

a.       So, is Gartner’s proclamation of the death of the data centre, an exaggeration?

2.       According to Gartner, workload placement is moving to the cloud. This is creating a baseline for infrastructure strategy based on workloads rather than physical data centres. How should the CIO and Infrastructure & Operation heads rethink their infrastructure strategies to accommodate this shift?

3.       Given all the emerging new technologies like AI, automation, edge computing and the list goes on, what is the right mindset that CIOs and leadership need to take towards developing a strategy that will provide the resilience and futureproofing they want to achieve in the years ahead?

4.       As a consulting business, what are the most common observations you have about the customers you engage within Asia?

5.       Concerns about vendor lock-in? 

a.       How to address security around hybrid multi-cloud?

b.       How will the CIO address the lack of in-house skills?

6.       What is your prognostication about the future state of data centre buildout and use in Asia in 2021 and 2022?