ThoughtWorks is a privately owned, global technology company with 42 offices in 15 countries. It provides software design and delivery and tools and consulting services. Here, Sunit Parekh, Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks. Saurabh Mookherjee, Lead Infrastructure Consultant, ThoughtWorks, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the emerging trends for data center networking in 2020+?

Sunit Parekh: Emerging trends would involve key practices like customers and accounts adopting virtual private networking. Add to this the push for higher bandwidth, low latency connectivity and the ask for Disaster Recovery (DR) or backup sites which the company can temporarily relocate to, in case of security issues or natural disasters. The icing on the cake would be pre-built connectivity with cloud service providers because that enables elasticity and extensibility in infrastructure.

DQ: How is the market now for adoption of hybrid cloud and data center virtualization?

Sunit Parekh: We believe the market is perfectly primed for cloud adoption. Cloud technology is built on top of virtualization, which allows for fine grained allocation of resources. This is a definitive requirement for public cloud offerings that can cater to multiple customers.

The fact is private data centers can also benefit from deploying technologies to build private clouds. This ensures a more efficient use of hardware resources and also provides a layer of abstraction thus, freeing development teams from worrying about acquiring and provisioning infrastructure to deploy their applications on.

DQ: How are you rebalancing your provision of data center services, colocation and capacity management?

Sunit Parekh: As of now, the trend is moving towards cloud adoption over the last couple of years. The overwhelming first choice is cloud unless there are regulatory or compliance requirements that demand on-premise data centers. Enterprises are seeing challenges in terms of upfront capacity commitment and lead time while upgrading for future needs when they opt for on-premise data centers.

DQ: How are you updating DR plans to reflect this new world of vendor-distributed work?

Sunit Parekh: Enterprises choose data center vendors who have DR setups because their offerings specifically meet all regulatory and compliance guidelines. And, in DR setups, connectivity between data centers having high-bandwidth, low-latency networking is very important (mostly, fiber).

DQ: Are you looking at remote management of data centers?

Saurabh Mookherjee: The fact is no one visits data centers anymore, and that mandates the need for remote management.  Additionally, cloud technologies, both public and private allow for infrastructure as code that can be maintained easily in source code version control systems – just like application code can. This provides an easy method to track configuration changes and feature introductions.

The fast growing ecosystem of tools and techniques to develop cloud native applications means the requirement for data center management in the traditional sense could be minimal or not required at all in certain cases.

DQ: Demand for cloud services will soar in some sectors, but wither in other verticals. Which sectors, specifically?

Saurabh Mookherjee: We believe that cloud services will undoubtedly rise across all sectors that have been affected and servicing the Covid-19 pandemic — healthcare, insurance, financial services, education, ecommerce, telecom and more. Automobile and travel are two sectors where we will see some resistance. However, the overall trend is more towards adoption given the current scenario.

DQ: How are CIOs looking at datacenters in Covid-19?

Saurabh Mookherjee: CIOs are looking at a hybrid approach, where the strategy is to go cloud-first. Only critical applications with regulatory and compliance requirements will look at the data center option. The current COVID crisis has pushed enterprises further towards cloud adoption as the lead time is quite high when it comes to data centers.