The aftermath from the ongoing Shadow IT trend will have a significant impact in 2015. Line of Business leaders that satisfied their forward-looking IT needs by utilizing the facilities of the public cloud service providers — such as AWS and Google — will refuse to retreat back to legacy corporate data centers, unless major enhancements are deployed.

The advent of next-generation data center capabilities have raised the bar of expectations — the disruption of the status quo has been in motion for some time. Traditional IT leaders that deferred important decisions about infrastructure investment and staff retaining must now prepare to concede.

International Data Corporation (IDC) has highlighted their Data Center predictions, based on a recent worldwide market study. Their latest predictions report is designed to help C-level leaders capitalize on emerging market opportunities and plan for future growth.

“The key question for organizations is whether they have the insight, capital, and commitment to design, build, and operate datacenters for reliable and dynamic delivery of transaction, content serving, archiving, and analytic capacity on time, with no delays and no excuses to individuals and organizations around the world,” said Richard Villars, vice president at IDC.

According to the IDC assessment, the likely answer will be NO — the typical CIO and legacy IT manager is not prepared to embrace the elevated next-generation data center requirements. Instead, they will rely increasingly on third-parties to build, deploy, manage, and/or rent IT capacity and store their important corporate information.

IDC Predictions for Next-Gen Data Center

By 2016, 65 percent of an organization’s infrastructure investments will target creation and expansion of what IDC calls “3rd Platform” systems of engagement and insight, rather than maintaining existing systems of record.

In the next two years, 25 percent of all large and mid-sized businesses will confront significant power and cooling facilities mismatches with new IT systems, limiting them to using less than 75 percent of their physical data center space.

In the next two years, incompatible or immature IT asset management practices will prevent 80 percent of organizations from being able to take full advantage of converged and software-defined IT solutions in their own facilities.

By 2016, hyperscale (also known as Web-Scale) data centers will house more than 50 percent of raw compute capacity and 70 percent of raw storage capacity worldwide, becoming the primary adopters of new compute and storage technologies.

By 2017, 60 percent of the data center-based IT assets that organizations rely on to conduct business and deliver services will be in colocation, hosting, and public cloud computing service provider data centers.

Over the next two years, over 60 percent of companies will stop managing most of their IT infrastructure, relying on advanced automation and qualified service partners to boost efficiency and directly tie data center spend to business value.

Over the next three years, 70 percent of large and mid-sized organizations will initiate major network redesigns to better align inter-data center and data center-to-edge data flows.

By 2018, third-party service providers will own a quarter of all IT assets installed in organization’s server rooms and closets, posing major asset management and governance challenges.

By 2016, the top 20 providers of consumer and business as-a-service solutions will deploy broad spectrum, multi-data center security solutions.

By 2018, every organization in data-intensive industries will have formal data ethics review processes and will publicize data control policies.