Vertiv, a company specializing in data center infrastructure solutions, recently announced key trends of 2021. The company predicted that the shift toward the utility-like status of the data center will be prominent.

First of all, it is expected that network availability will be expanded to rural and remote areas, which will increase expectations for more people to use critical applications. This will pressure data centers to maintain connectivity even to the edge located more outside the network.

As the ability to guarantee and protect connectivity in an increasingly distributed hybrid network becomes as important as the uptime criterion previously valued in the data center field, the boundaries between availability and connectivity are also disappearing.

“Data centers have been moving toward public utility-type status for some time, but the pandemic has crystalized the need to establish the kinds of official guardrails that have been commonplace across other utilities,” said Gary Niederpruem, Chief Strategy and Development Officer for Vertiv. “This isn’t just about working from home, although that is part of it. More importantly, it is about supporting the digital economy in its most mission-critical forms, which include increased reliance on telemedicine and health, enhanced e-commerce and global telecommunications and mass media.”

Pandemics, meanwhile, is setting new standards for digital infrastructure. The industry is struggling to break through the global shutdown. Among these, Vertiv experts predicted that trends in the acceleration of digitalization and sustainability will be noticeable in 2021.

First and foremost, COVID-19 will have a lasting effect on the workforce and the IT ecosystem supporting the new work-from-home model.  Stimulated by the pandemic, investment in IT infrastructure is to be expanded, reliable, and re-workable.

Remote services that minimize on-site service calls are already emerging, and this trend will continue after the pandemic.   Global companies are taking this change not just temporarily, but as a permanent change in the way they work.

Vertiv emphasized that over time, there will be changes in the tasks handled by face-to-face tasks versus remote tasks, which will be accelerated as customers would want to minimize face-to-face tasks. It is expected that artificial intelligence for connectivity, remote monitoring, data analysis, and decision-making will be important in the medical industry as well.