Even as data centre adoption increases in Bangladesh, organisations and operators face certain challenges.
These issues were discussed at W.Media’s Digital Week South Asia panel discussion titled ‘Key Data centre Industry Challenges and how the industry should deal with it?’ Moderated by NK Singh, Founder and CEO, Data Centre Guru. The panellists included Khairuzzaman, Deputy MD & COO Centre Counterparty Bangladesh Limited and Asif Mahmood, Founder & Chairman, AND Group.
Investment flow in DCs
In the last few years, huge investments have been made for data centres in Bangladesh. Enterprise organisations financial institutions, government organisation initially tried to set up a captive data centre, later gradually other businesses came forward for the outsourcing model and started considering other aspects like space, hosting infrastructure that was already available and a number of data centre companies have come forward for the outsourcing model”, said A.S.M Khairuzzaman.
He further added that the data centre business in Bangladesh has huge potential. According to an assessment, a business with the opportunity of 100 billion could be created in Bangladesh in the coming years.
Many organisations are now planning to move from the captive data centre to the outsourcing model as initially there was zero capital investment and the ones who had already established a captive data centre are now planning to move to the outsourcing model.
There are a few challenges that organisations are facing to grow in this industry. When it comes to the captive data centre challenges, there was difficulty in finalising the site for the data centre, availability of the environmental facilities, data confidentiality and uptime. The outsource data centre could prove to be cost-effective.
Impact of COVID on DC Market
COVID-19 has impacted the IT industry. If you consider data centre, computing and digital transformation.
The process has actually accelerated due to the work from home concept and the fact that people can get their work done without physically being present at the place, the process of digital transformation has increased the demand for data centres, if the transformation continues at its pace it is said that by 2025 there will be 20.6 zettabytes of data that would be generated.
“From this, we can understand that the amount of data that is being generated means that all the digital systems are being implemented”, said Asif Mahmood.
He further added that the data centre which is the basis of cloud computing which is the infrastructure of the new normal, the off-premises digital transformation are all connected.
Therefore, the demand for data centres will only increase in the future.
The year 2021 saw a huge demand for data centres and, the next question is what will be the transformation
The traditional data centres had a few inefficiencies which are expected to improve with time and organisations will also look forward to building green data centres and the green data centres will have an edge over the traditional ones.
“Based on the digital Bangladesh initiative we have flourished a lot. The cloud computing and data centres would start flourishing even more and the COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate the process”, added Mahmood.
“After India, Bangladesh is the fastest-growing data centre industry”, said NK Singh.