Information Technology is a cornerstone of all modern economies.
A major trend in IT today is the move toward virtualisation - concepts such as cloud computing and hosting. These are key components of services like social media and video conferencing as well as more mundane applications like email and websites. Critical business applications such as the Microsoft Office suite are now provided as subscription services from data centres rather than packages on CDs installed on the users own PC
The move towards consolidation in the data centre industry is very clear: a small number of big data centres is more efficient and cost effective than a large number of small ones.
The optimum location for a large data centre is dependent on number of factors, two of the most important being energy supply and connections to communications and the internet. Beyond this, there is much less reliance on traditional infrastructure such as roads and rail links.
The importance of energy, and growing concerns about the need to use renewable resources is a strong driver in the data centre sector. Wales does well here, with a high level of electricity generation from renewable technology.
Wales is therefore as good a location for data centres as any of her neighbours, and should be able to capture a share of this market.
As a key component to IT, data centres draw in investment, create jobs, and enable other enterprises in business, education and social matters. A country that does not have good IT policies and a clear understanding of how data centres fit into this picture will inevitably loose out to economies that do.
This document examines opportunities to win data centre business in Wales, and the economic and social consequences of doing so. Download the document
For Wales to have a successful data centre industry, we must ask why Wales is a suitable place for companies, charities, government agencies to store and process their data here.
The data centre services market has been growing rapidly for the past few years with a compound annual growth rate of around 13%, a trend that is likely to accelerate in coming years.
While there is a strong case for upgrading road and rail links between North and South Wales, the cost of such upgrades would be very high. However this is not true of communications and IT infrastructure.
