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

This is one of the findings from the new IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Data Centre 2015 Predictons. Other predictions include:

* By 2016, 65% of organisations’ infrastructure investments will target creation and expansion of 3rd Platform systems of engagement and insight, rather than maintaining existing systems of record.

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

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

* By 2016, hyperscale data centres will house more than 50% of raw compute capacity and 70% of raw storage capacity worldwide, becoming the primary consumers/adopters of new compute and storage technologies.

* By 2017, 60% of the data centre-based IT assets that organizations rely on to conduct business and deliver services will be in colocation, hosting, and cloud data centres.

* Over the next two years, over 60% 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 centre spend to business value.

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

* By 2018, third-party service providers will own a quarter of all IT assets installed in organisations’ 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 centre security solutions.

* By 2018, every organisation in data-intensive industries will have formal data ethics review processes and will publicise data control policies.

“The key question for organizations is whether they have the insight, capital, and commitment to design, build, and operate data centres for reliable and dynamic delivery of transaction, content serving, archiving, and analytic capacity on time, with no delays and no excuses to individuals and organisations around the world,” says Richard Villars, vice-president: Data centre and Cloud Research at IDC. “For many the answer will be ‘no!’ They will rely increasingly on third parties to build, deploy, manage, and ‘rent’ IT capacity and store important information.”