5G is coming, and with it, profound changes to the data center industry. 

At the DCD>Zettastructure conference in London, VaporIO’s CEO Cole Crawford discussed how 5G will change the market. Rather than blossom into consumer products like 4G, next generation wireless will become a resource for ”new economy companies” and mobile network operators. 

Turn and face the strange

Crawford said this would allow for the creation of ”new experiences required to exist in both an Internet and a decentralized data center footprint for extremely low latency applications, extreme amounts of data ingress and egress.”

“I firmly believe that we’re witnessing a huge transformation in the data center ecosystem, like we did a few years ago when colocation companies were questioning cloud. Now, cloud companies are questioning data gravity, data proximity, data velocity, etc.”

He added: ”The post-5G edge brings with it a paradigm shift in how we build, manage and operate decentralized data centers: you can’t take a large data center today, shrink it down into a box and call that an edge data center, those just don’t work. I believe everything from security, to remote hands, to smart hands and the autonomy of data centers changes.”

”All of a sudden everything changes, scheduling changes, authentication, authorization profiles change. So I definitely believe that we’ll have to rethink how we both service and operate physically and logically the footprint that exists today.”