In today's fast-paced digital landscape, the demand for skilled professionals in the data centre industry has never been higher. And it's not just in our sector, sourcing technical talent and strategies to attract and retain them continues to be an issue in most sectors as a recent Deloitte article highlighted.

Manchester has come a long way - from pioneering the world’s first stored program digital computer, to becoming the top tech city in the UK outside of London. The MCC 2021-2026 Digital Strategy now guides a £5bn digital economy, with more than 10,000 businesses employing over 96,000 people. It has seen the development of five unicorns and is still home to three, billion-pound businesses. So, the city of bees is buzzing.

The evolution of public cloud over the past few years has been remarkable. Digital transformation, remote work, and AI have created breakneck growth. Back in 2018, before anyone uttered the words COVID or ChatGPT, there were already big drivers for public cloud. The global digital transformation market size was valued at $320 billion, and set for 18% annual growth, to reach a projected $695 billion by 2025.

Gaming has gone mainstream. On average, people are spending seven and a half hours per week (roughly one hour per day) gaming online, The gaming market is also an extremely competitive one, with games publishers and distributors fighting for mindshare with consumers, and subsequently maximising the time spent on their platform. To achieve this, user experience is key – games must interest and delight, without lagging or crashing.

As we dive into 2024 the relentless march of technological progress combined with economic green shoots (the year the ‘UK turns a page on the difficult post post-pandemic years ) it should be an exciting opportunity for Data Centres and the talent who work in them…and whilst people are clearly excited about the opportunities this presents for the industry, there remains a nervousness.

Having decided to embrace the opportunities of the cloud, be it a full migration, or developing a hybrid infrastructure, one of the first questions a business faces is how to transfer all its data into the cloud. This question will evolve rapidly, as the business realises that not only must it continually transfer new data to the cloud, but that the amount of data is going to grow massively.

As John Lennon once said, another year over…and a new one just begun. As we head into 2024, it’s important to reflect on what we’ve seen and where we need to focus in the year ahead.

Computer vision: digital understanding of the physical world From face recognition to fire prevention, autonomous cars to medical diagnosis, the promise of video analytics has enticed technology innovators for years. Video analytics, the processing and analysing of visual data through machine learning and artificial intelligence, is perceived as a significant opportunity for edge computing.

2023 was the year of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 2024 will build on the incredible momentum of the likes of ChatGPT, Google Bard, Microsoft CoPilot, and others, delivering applications and services that apply AI to every industry imaginable. A recent analysis piece from Schroders makes the point well: “The mass adoption of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) …has sparked interest akin to the Californian Gold Rush.”

As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, a new frontier has emerged in the world of networks - the automated edge. But what exactly does this mean for business and why does it matter? In simple terms, automated edge refers to self-configuring, self-optimising, and self-healing capabilities being built into edge devices and software.