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The hybrid cloud data center became an unquestionable reality in 2020 and the change in consumption and operations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic were important factors in this scenario, reveals ISG Provider Lens ™ Next-Gen Private / Hybrid Cloud report – Data Center Services & Solutions – Brazil 2020, recently released. This is the first study that evaluates the hybrid and private cloud market in the country during the pandemic.
According to the study conducted and represented by TGT Consult in Brazil, all public cloud service providers now realize the importance of offering software and services to enable hybrid infrastructure and the surprise of remote work has changed consumption patterns and sustained data centers so far.
The study, which began in April, found that at the beginning of the pandemic, there was an expectation of a decrease in turnover and cost reduction. According to Pedro L. Bicudo Maschio, author of the ISG survey and analyst TGT Consult, “there was a reduction in some demands in the sector, but, on the other hand, electronic commerce registered an increase and remote work demanded more from the infrastructure. E-commerce and the forced and sudden home office have so far supported data centers”, points out the author.
Despite Covid-19’s unprecedented impact on the 59 providers participating in the survey, it is striking that none of them stopped their operations. Those who own a larger share of e-commerce client companies reported greater demand for processing and bandwidth with increasing customer transaction volume.
Some of Microsoft’s partners have deployed thousands of users to Microsoft Teams SaaS with connectivity to the data center. Those who support more traditional data centers have reported a sudden increase in VPN demand, and some have deployed thousands of new VPNs in just a few days to allow remote work for their customers. Some on-premises data centers that lacked the tools needed to support such an environment for their employees had new ones installed.
Pedro Bicudo explains that the report included data center companies and not just cloud companies, which is why the need to modernize these technologies was very important. There was also a greater perception of the advantages of outsourcing the infrastructure due to the need to maintain tools and technologies.
“The rush to the lockdown generated this acceleration for the cloud and companies without the cloud became obsolete. Undoubtedly, this was a year that changed the perspective on the importance of the cloud, in which giant companies started to report their first cloud experiments, such as, for example, the 5 largest banks in Brazil that announced that they had part of their systems running on a cloud”. Pedro also points out that many suppliers present in the survey are providing services to these banks.
As large companies in Brazil gradually adopt hybrid clouds, cutting-edge computing is advancing because it requires a unified management platform, the report says. Most managed service providers that support complex enterprise environments have developed robust management platforms that reduce deployment time for a hybrid cloud configuration.
The report also highlights that many service providers in Brazil are using artificial intelligence and cognitive computing to support the automation of managed services, the report adds. Intelligent automation has become the standard for managed service providers serving large companies. Although a fully automated hybrid cloud data center is not yet a reality, vendors are moving in that direction. Using automation, some companies have automated up to 70% of their service requests and incident resolution.
The study also points out that the Brazilian intermediate market in the private and hybrid cloud data center sector has been growing faster than the market for large companies. In recent years, service providers had reported that new customers were companies with internal data centers and were willing to try the cloud. However, in 2019, some companies in the Brazilian intermediate market changed their suppliers, indicating aggressive competition in the market.
The managed hosting market has been losing relevance in Brazil, as it paves the way for public and hybrid cloud systems. However, many vendors have focused on improving their managed services and data center facilities. Some providers have left the managed hosting market and the rest of the competitors are focused on improving their value proposition.
An emerging trend is for managed hosting providers that have started using high-quality colocation facilities instead of their own data centers to host their hardware and software, says the ISG study.
The report also shows that data center security providers are expanding their capabilities. Suppliers are focused on zero trust, micro segmentation, SD-WAN and AI for identification and response to threats. Top vendors are also offering state-of-the-art firewalls that can be integrated with other security tools.
Quadrants
ISG’s studies serve as an important decision-making basis for the positioning of key relationships and market considerations. In the case of the ISG Provider Lens ™ Next-Gen Private / Hybrid Cloud – Data Center Services & Solutions – Brazil 2020 report, a total of 59 providers were evaluated and classified into 6 quadrants, namely: Managed Services for Large Accounts, Managed Services for Midmarket, Managed Hosting, Colocation Services, Hyperconverged Systems and Data Center Security Products.
The report named Compasso UOL, Equinix and IBM as leaders in three quadrants and CenturyLink, Cisco and TIVIT in two. Ascenty, Broadcom / Symantec, Capgemini, Check Point, CorpFlex, Dedalus Prime, Dell EMC, DXC Technology, Fortinet, HPE, Juniper Networks, Nextios, Palo Alto Networks, Scala Data Centers, TCS, Trend Micro, T-Systems, Unisys, VMware and Wipro are leaders in one quadrant.
The “rising stars” identified are Logicalis, Matrix, Nutanix, ODATA and T-Systems.
The full report was made available by Ascenty, Matrix and Scala and can be accessed through the links below:
https://conteudo.ascenty.com/relatorio_isg_colocation
https://materiais.matrix.com.br/estudo-isg
https://scaladatacenters.com/isg-provider-lens-2020 Source: SEGS