Future data centres looking towards catapulting security

Rajkumar Vijayarangakannan, Technical Evangelist, Manage Engine

Growth of next-generation Data center market

The next generation of data centres has to make room for the exponential growth of data as well as ensure its security and availability by equipping their security systems with intelligent software.

The data centres of the future are looking towards catapulting security to supreme heights by leveraging Zero Trust network access, AI- and ML-based predictive security analytics, and intensive vulnerability scanning and patching. Additionally, containerised and serverless architectures will offer multiple layers of protection by means of network segmentation and application containerisation with enhanced firewalling capabilities. This restricts the lateral movement of hackers throughout the data centre's network as it places security checkpoints across various points in the network, isolating network traffic and restricting access across segments. This promotes improved monitoring and highly secured access control while making it harder for the hacker to breach the data centre's security. All of these coordinated efforts will improve the security posture of the data centre.

A Challenge or Opportunity
ManageEngine envisages that the next generation of data centres will be logically run and managed by software, paving the way for software-defined data centres and promising increased agility, higher productivity, and reduced costs. By deploying predictive analytics, machine learning (ML), and cognitive computing, ManageEngine plans to upgrade its data centre monitoring product lines with AI- and ML-based models along with real-time data analytics; this will tremendously improve data centre performance and energy efficiency.

IoT adoption to support next-generation data centers
The future demands that data centres become environmentally friendly with efficient energy use. IoT-managed data centres help data centre operators to continually monitor servers' energy consumption and to remotely manipulate physical and environmental variables without wasting excess energy, thereby greatly reducing capital and operational costs. This massively decreases the carbon footprint of data centres with less on-site human intervention, bringing forth more sustainable “lights-out data centres.”

Expectation of high-level consolidation by 2023
The emergence of 5G technology means increasing demand for faster connectivity. This will drive data centres to adopt a hybrid model that blends the best attributes of on-premises data centres: colocation and edge computing for enhanced processing power. At the same time, enterprises are moving workloads to public cloud operators to address scaling demand. So, at one end of the spectrum there is consolidation happening, but the other side is still seeing efforts made to optimise costs.