Data Center Profitability Skyrockets but Serious Challenges Remain

AUSTIN, Texas - Nov. 24, 2020 - PRLog -- The Pandemic Is Driving Cloud Computing/Data Center Revenue Sky High

Whether it's working from home, meeting colleagues via Zoom, shopping for goods and services online, taking part in online classes, or playing a video game in the living room, the coronavirus pandemic has changed how we work, collaborate, shop, study, and play.

Given that most of these revolve around online activities, what's been the effect on cloud computing and the data center market?

The short answer to the question is that services powered by data centers are booming, particularly among the big players that dominate the cloud computing and data center landscape.

As the pandemic set in, the leader in cloud computing operations, Amazon Web Services (AWS), set a new quarterly revenue record in early 2020 of $10.22 billion (up 33% from the previous year) – representing over 75% of Amazon's overall operating income during the quarter.

The revenue for Microsoft's online services (which includes its Azure cloud computing platform, Office 365, and other online services) was up 39% to $13.3 billion. (The company reported Azure revenue was up nearly 60%, but no dollar figure was broken out.)

Google Cloud reported its revenue reached $2.8 billion (up 52%) during the same timeframe; this figure includes revenue from its online SaaS G Suite software tools. Facebook, which, like Google, builds its own enterprise data centers to power their sprawling online services, reported revenues of $17.7 billion during the same quarter, up 18% year over year.

Data Center Best Practices: How To Design A Data Facility From A Network Engineer's Perspective

Over the last 20+ years, modern data center facilities have evolved from their roots hosting Internet Service Providers and co-located corporate servers into the highly sophisticated enterprise-class data operators of today, responsible for powering a range of mission-critical online services in the cloud, including: remote power-by-the-hour computing, on-demand digital storage solutions, carrier hotels (the modern evolution of server co-location), as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS), network-as-a-service (NaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.

During this timeframe, data center operations have converged on what we might call a reference design that solves a series of fairly rigid design constraints. In the following section, we'll touch on some of the "best practices" that have evolved to satisfy these requirements.

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