A 2020 View of Micro Data Centers

This audio was created using Microsoft Azure Speech Services

We have already discussed that Micro data centers are breakthrough solutions, but we are still in the early adoption phase and the market potential is untold. Where are they already in use? How fast will the market ramp up?

Actually, you may already be using micro data centers and don’t even know it.The demands of real-time (or near real-time) data processing needs in environments with factory automation (robots), industrial automation (cranes), and bidding or trading stocks and bonds, for example, call for the capabilities micro data centers provide.

The sheer amount of data required in such industries like oil and gas drilling and exploration, construction and mining also require processing to be on site and so they do not go through latency increasing hubs.

Other sites may not have as much big data, but micro data centers offer advantages through standardization fast deployment, ease of management and troubleshooting and security, not to mention cost effectiveness.

But the use case on the horizon with the greatest potential is a massive distributed network of micro data enters to form a content distribution network. This processing on the edge will support the commercial Internet of Things (IoT), including the fast emerging category of wearable devices.   The processing of data could be reduced to mili-seconds here.

Forbes recently reported on the massive size of the IoT — expecting worldwide market solutions to reach a value of $7.1 trillion by 2020 and connected devices to double by then to 40+ billion. While micro data centers might be a niche today, they will become more ubiquitous as they will be needed to facilitate this unprecedented connectivity..