It’s that time of the year when experts gaze into their crystal balls, offering up predictions on what the next year has in store. As experts in data center and colocation services, the Equinix team has come up with a list of our own trends that we think will be top of mind for technology decision makers next year. Here are a few.

Public and private cloud service providers will drive IT market demand 
We expect 2014 to be a year of explosive growth in cloud service consumption with all the major cloud providers becoming more aggressive in deploying their services. Over the coming year, we also expect to see many enterprise CIOs moving beyond simply deploying selected applications in the Cloud and start to really move cloud services mainstream for their production environments.

We also see the private-or-public cloud debate of yesteryear shifting to the private-AND-public cloud debate where enterprises are benefiting from the security and reliability of the private cloud while harnessing the scalability and flexibility power of the public cloud. In fact, Gartner recently advised enterprises to design private cloud services with a hybrid future in mind and make sure future integration and interoperability are possible. We couldn’t agree more.

Convergence of business and personal use of technology
Employees have been using their personal devices at work for quite some time, much to the dismay of the IT department (more on that later). And now that the floodgates of Do-It-Yourself IT (DIY-IT) have opened, more employees than ever are adapting the services they use in their personal lives (i.e. Gmail, Dropbox, etc) as business and collaboration tools.

The concept of bring your own device (BYOD) has evolved to include bring your own apps and bring your own cloud, which is creating new IT challenges for the enterprise beyond simply managing devices. For 2014, we see the cloud playing a more pronounced role in propelling this trend, as DIY-IT makes it a technological imperative for companies of any size to secure their cloud’s data and processes, in addition to all the components that connect into it.

IT struggles to keep up with business process demands 
With concepts such as BYOD in full force, IT is struggling to stay on top of all the demands that are placed on it. Growing traffic, an increasingly dispersed end user base and the proliferation of mobile devices have all created a perfect storm of latency and performance issues that are simply overwhelming old deployment models.

As a result, expect to see more IT strategies that encompass an organization’s data management, network optimization and application performance. For instance, we see an increasing number of our customers deploying their common, off-the-shelf enterprise network equipment from their corporate location to shared data centers where network service providers come to peer. This allows for a highly available and agile service that gets the IT department out ahead of the demand storm. 

Big data here to stay 
We believe that big data is in it for the long haul. Storing, processing and analyzing data is becoming less and less expensive. Numerous companies are in the big data application development game and will continue to produce applications that harness data in new ways. In fact, IDC predicts that companies will spend more than US$14bn on big data technologies or services which translates to 30% growth year-over-year.

As a result, expect low latency, close proximity and immediate access to this data to be top priorities for many CIOs.

Overseas market heats up 
We continue to see a surge in demand for data center and interconnection services in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) with current estimates placing the public cloud market at US$22bn and the virtual private cloud market at $10bn by 2020.

South America - and in particular Brazil - is expected to be a hot market as companies prepare for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games that will be held there. Equinix recently opened a second data center in the region as we anticipate many multinational companies gearing up for those events by expanding their IT infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro. And as Brazil continues its rise as an international commercial center, we expect companies will decide it’s in their best interest to stay.