“Digital demands are increasing so much that, no matter how fast the cloud is growing, people are still investing in their data centers,” Sinclair says. In ESG’s latest research on data infrastructure trends, respondents report the average expected growth rate for data in the public cloud was a staggering 39% year over year.1 But that doesn’t mean that the amount of data stored on-premises is declining. In fact, the estimated growth rate for data centers is comparable—35% year over year.
“If we think about a large modern enterprise, we may have two, three, four data centers; three, four, five public cloud providers; dozens, if not hundreds of edge locations,” says Sinclair. “And we have data moving and apps moving everywhere all the time.”