Increasingly, clients of data centers have come to realize that they have far more bargaining power than they used to in configuring and paying for implementations. This, in large part, is due to public and private cloud instances, as well as emerging technologies like application containerization.

But there are caveats they must address, however: companies often find themselves paying far more than anticipated for their cloud instances, with unanticipated costs from data ingress and egress. They also are concerned about issues like de facto vendor lock-in: it's far more difficult to migrate data from one cloud provider to another than marketing material would have you believe.

Some forward-thinking data center firms, however, are adopting new approaches to data, such as utilizing an application-first approach and spend portability; this has been done for a while by cloud engineering consultancies, but is still novel to data center firms. As a result, they are able to design scenarios from a higher-level strategic approach, under which their customers' data can be created and migrated between clouds and colocation centers, even on-premises locations.

We'll be discussing the challenges companies face in cost-effectively managing ever-increasing workloads and applications across various locations, and how these new agnostic approaches enable them to gain greater control of their costs today, even while planning their strategies for tomorrow.

Takeaway

• Attendees will understand why they now hold the upper hand in dealing with vendors and in designing strategies that will meet their current and future requirements

• Attendees will learn why providers must become more flexible in helping their clients develop and implement flexible deployment strategies that incorporate a full range of locations, from on-prem to colo to public/private cloud

• Attendees will gain a greater appreciation for data repatriation and how this is becoming a "must-have" for their firms with an application-first approach; applications may be initially developed for the cloud, but others (and their data) may be better positioned for a colocation center over time, or vice versa. In either event, the ability to flexibly move information between repositories without incurring "vendor lock-in" penalties is an emerging trend for customers and providers to consider