The increase in migration to the cloud and the accompanying shift to paying for technology investments “as a service” is changing the outlook for how IT is structured and staffed — including changes for your data center. Everything from software to platforms and infrastructure is being sold as a service, and soon it may be possible for your company to adopt an Everything as a Service (XaaS) structure for your technology needs.

How will a data center look if XaaS takes off as a concept? Here are a few ways your data center might change as it adapts to XaaS.

Management will act as a liaison. In a true cloud environment, you’ll still need someone to manage complexity. In some enterprise-level companies, there can be thousands of applications vying for storage and bandwidth, and your data center manager will be instrumental in balancing how workloads are evaluated and determining how to keep costs under control.

One important aspect of working as a liaison is the relationship with vendors. A data center manager will determine which vendor has the right match for the software the company needs and will work through any implementation challenges.

Data center management will oversee security. You have in-house security and your vendors have security, too, but there will still be a need for a high level of visibility into how data travels across applications and to servers. You’ll need expertise in writing security details into vendor contracts to be sure you and your vendors know how security is being covered and how to manage risk in case of a breach.

A hybrid environment may be more realistic than XaaS. While you may see XaaS at some point, there’s likely to be a relatively long period where a hybrid solution of some cloud and some on-site applications needs to be managed. Your data center managers will need to be savvy with workloads, determining what should be cloud-based and what remains on-site.

By the time there’s a possibility of going fully XaaS, your data center will be irreplaceable as a source for insight into cloud management and infrastructure. It’s necessary that a data center evolve to meet the needs of the current market, but it may change over the next decade.

To learn more about the role of the data center in an XaaS world, talk with our specialists at EmconIT. We offer data center solutions to fit your needs and your budget.