Colt says that this expansion is driven by an unprecedented surge in demand for its cloud hosting and colocation services. As more and more devices come online, a great wave of digital information is flooding businesses in all sectors.
The research outfit IDC predicts that by 2020, the global digital universe will reach 44 zettabytes – more than ten times the amount of data held in data centres today. This represents a major challenge to IT professionals in handling and storing this data. However, it is also a major opportunity for their businesses to create new revenue streams from this extremely valuable information.
Robin Brown, VP at Colt Data Centre Services, said: “Business value is increasingly becoming defined by the scale of an organisation’s data assets and its ability to manage and manipulate business-critical information. We’ve designed, built and managed data centres for more than 15 years, but never before has our business witnessed such unprecedented demand from both the cloud market – including small, medium and the very largest cloud providers – as well as the enterprise colocation market.
“Enterprises are deploying data centres as critical infrastructure for IT and business strategy. We’ve added 7,000 square metres to stay ahead of the market.
The Colocation market is predicted to grow by 10 to 15% over the next 4 years, with global data centre traffic also growing nearly 3-fold to 10.4 zettabytes per year by 2019.
The 451 Research Group predicts that the Asian market will grow by 16.2% (CAGR) by 2018 to $14.5 billion. This is underlined by Colt’s claim that the new data centre in
Colt Data Centre Services has added 1,500 sqm to its flagship Welwyn Garden City data centre near London. Additional capacity has been added in Berlin (500 square meters) and Hamburg (600 square metres).
