Businesses in Malaysia must invest in solutions to future-proof their critical infrastructure in anticipation of the growth of edge computing across Asia. This emerged as one of the key takeaways in the report Data Centre 2025: Closer To The Edge, a global industry-wide survey conducted by Vertiv. The report asked over 800 industry professionals for their view of the future of data centre industry, amid global disruptions such as the Internet of things (IOT), 5G and artificial intelligence, among others.
This reflects a global sentiment on the increasing prevalance of edge computing in the data centre landscape, which is fuelled by more process-insinteve applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet of things and 5G technology. Globally 55 percent of respondents expect IT resource utilisation rates to grow at the edge by 2025.
“The results of Vertiv’s latest survey highlights the growing recognition among businesses locally and globallly of having the right infrastructure in place to support the proliferation of edge applications and devices. This is true in Malaysia where we are seeing a lot of our customers deploying micro data centres that focus on speed, flexibilility and adaptability to support their edge applications,” said Teoh Wooi Keat, country manager of Vertiv in Malaysia.
The migration to the edge is changing the way today’s industry think about the data centre. Amongst the participants who have edge sites today or expect to have edge sites in 2025, more than half (53 percent) expect the number of edge sites they support to grow by at least 100 percent with 20 percent expecting a 400 percent or more increase. Collectively, survey participants expect their total number of edge computing sites to grow 226 percent globally between now and 2025.
More than 800 data centre professionals participated in Vertiv’s survey. Among other notable results include:
- Participants aren’t as bullish on the prospects for solar and wind power in the data centre as they were in 2014. Then, they projected about 34 percent of data centre power would come from those resources by 2025. Now the expectation is 21 percent – still optimistic but mindful of the ambitious timeline.
- Globally, 16 percent of participants expect to be retired by 2025, exacerbating an already problematic talent shortage. In the US that number is an alarming 33 percent.
Complete survey results are available in the report, Data Centre 2025: Closer to the Edge. The original report and additional analysis of the results are available at Vertiv.com.
