At the turn of the 21st century, virtualisation promised a flexible, centralised data centre. But the global IT community wasn’t aware of the need. Early adopters and innovators realised business advantages well before virtualisation gained mainstream adoption.

If you are a service provider (SP) thinking about your next generation cloud and hosting services, this paper will help you navigate a go-forward strategy. It provides next generation data centre (NGDC) trends and business strategies in the context of five architectural principles. It examines key market influences fueling IT transformation in the SP market and the technological trends that support them. The five architectural principles are scale-out, guaranteed performance, automated management, data assurance, and global efficiencies. Cloud infrastructure delivery models such as IaaS, private clouds, and software-defined data centers (SDDC) are foundations for the NGDC.