IT Operations and the Evolution of the Data Centre
Vincent Fogarty, Sophia Flucker · 2023
Data centre exists because it is a necessary part of the infrastructure that powers the digital economy and the Information Technology (IT) of many small, medium, and large enterprises. Understanding the history behind digital products and services is important to understand how the underlying infrastructure has evolved and what it means specifically for IT infrastructure, including the data centre facility. Two forces began reshaping IT infrastructure and brought the infrastructure design of enterprise IT and the digital economy closer together: Virtualisation and Enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). With SaaS, a more important shift in supporting IT infrastructure had happened. In the beginning, the colocation model was limited to two types of facilities: Existing internet exchange points, internet service providers, or points-of-presence both on a national scale and regional scale offering to colocate server or networking equipment in their facilities to have better connectivity.