Top 10 Cloud Data Center Stories of 2024

When it comes to cloud computing, Data Center Knowledge spent 2024 learning from the past and looking to the future. We focused on detailing the history of some key trends in the cloud space, including outages at major public cloud platforms and the origins of the ever-present (and grammatically problematic) term on-premise.

We also focused on some emerging trends that have impacted the cloud and data center industry over the past year, such as the impact of VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom, cloud sustainability initiatives, and the convergence between AI and the cloud.

Keep reading for a complete look at the top cloud data center stories we covered this year, as well as what they reveal about the current and future status of cloud computing.

1. A History of Google Cloud and Data Center Outages

Increased reliability is often touted as one of the main reasons to move to the cloud – which is reasonable because, in general, major public cloud data centers fail less frequently than private data centers managed by your typical enterprise.
But as we reminded readers in an article detailing recent cloud data center outage events at Google facilities in Paris, London, Iowa, and beyond, even hyperscale data centers can and do go down. While internal issues like software problems and fires were the most common causes of Google outages, some incidents stemmed from weather events, like floods in France and heatwaves in the UK. Read more

Related:Top 10 Data Center Power and Cooling Stories of 2024

2. A History of Microsoft Azure Outages

When it comes to cloud data center outages, Google is in good company. Microsoft Azure, too, has experienced several failures at its data centers in recent years, including one that disrupted core Microsoft 365 services for three hours. (In case you’re wondering, Amazon also has a history of data center outages, although that article didn’t quite make our top 10 list of cloud data center stories of 2024.) Read more

3. The ‘On-Premise’ Debate: How a Data Center Slang Term Went Mainstream

If you work in the data center industry, you may use term on-premise (or on-prem) frequently. But have you ever stopped to wonder how the phrase entered the data center lexicon – or considered why on-premise doesn’t make grammatical sense? In a nutshell, the answer is that it should be on-premises – note the s on the end – because premise and premises are different words. If not, you’ll be enlightened by our coverage of the history of the term on-prem and why it has long irked certain CIOs. Read more

4. Are Public Clouds More Sustainable Than Private Data Centers?

Related:AI Data Centers Pose Regulatory Challenge, Jeopardizing Climate Goals – Study

Part of the reason why you might have heard a lot this year about on-prem – which sometimes refers to private data centers, even though they’re technically different – is because of debates about data center sustainability.

According to research released this year by IDC and Amazon, public clouds are more sustainable on the whole than private data centers, due to advantages like economies of scale and higher rates of renewable energy sourcing.

That said, there’s no guarantee that operating a given workload in a public cloud will result in better sustainability than running in on-prem or in a private cloud. It’s important to research the details of each option to ensure you get the best sustainability bang for your data center buck. Read more

5. The Pros and Cons of Public Cloud Storage for Data Center Backups

We also covered the pros and cons of public clouds vis-à-vis private data centers from the standpoint of storage. The main premise (see what we did there?) was that public clouds can offer a cost-effective, scalable solution for backing up data from private data centers.

That said, it’s important to consider potential challenges like slower data recovery due to the need to move data from the cloud back to your data center following an outage incident. Read more

Related:Post-Gen AI Hype: Enterprises Scrutinize Budgets and Raise the Bar

6. Guide to Migrating From VMware to Hyper-V

From a business perspective, one of the biggest cloud data center stories we followed this year was the impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, which closed in late 2023. Fears about VMware product changes following the acquisition prompted interest in alternative solutions – which is why we covered processes like how to switch from VMware to Hyper-V, an alternate virtualization platform. Read more

7. Broadcom Unveils New VMware Private Cloud Software for Data Center Operators

In other major cloud data center news this year, we covered efforts by Broadcom to mitigate customer anxieties following the merger – including the unveiling of new private cloud software for data centers. Actually, “new” is a bit of a misnomer because the updated product was the result of the merging of VMware offerings that Broadcom consolidated. Still, the move was arguably a positive one from the perspective of data center operators because it makes it easier to build private clouds. Read more

Read more of the latest cloud data center news

8. Oracle CloudWorld 2024: Embracing Multi-Cloud, Nuclear Energy, and Other Event Highlights

Oracle also made some notable product moves in 2024, which it showcased at CloudWorld in September. For the data center industry, the most important announcement was news that Oracle has begun partnering with the major public clouds – AWS, Azure, and GCP – in a bid to make its solutions more easily available to customers via public cloud platforms.

The move appeared to be a recognition on Oracle’s part that it can no longer expect its customers to use just Oracle solutions alone; it needs to evolve its product strategy for the multi-cloud era. Read more

9. Cloud Security Assurance: Is Automation Changing the Game?

The more complex your cloud architecture becomes, the harder it is to identify security risks and other misconfigurations. That’s why the ability to automate security assessments is growing increasingly important. But how good are the solutions that cloud providers offer for this purpose? To find out, we took a close look at compliance reporting tools from Azure and GCP.

The takeaway was that these solutions can automate much of the work necessary to identify misconfigurations that could trigger compliance violations, but they’re no substitute for human experts. Read more

10. Edge AI: Why the Future of AI Compute is at the Edge

Talk of AI was a dominant theme across discussions of cloud computing this year, which included plenty of headlines about how cloud providers are investing in AI.

What was less often discussed – but equally important – is the role of edge infrastructure in AI. That’s what we focused on in our report about edge AI, meaning AI workloads that run at the network edge instead of in traditional cloud data centers.

Although edge AI is not likely to become the most common way to deploy AI, it has an important role in enhancing AI performance and sustainability, mainly because it reduces the amount of data that needs to move across long distances to support AI training and inference. Read more