While I do have the flair for the dramatic, I don’t mean to alarm anyone by saying this, but your data is escaping from the datacenter. The volume and velocity of data are increasing at such a rapid rate, and being generated and consumed increasingly away from the traditional IT datacenter, that there is no other conclusion to draw. Data is no longer just in the data center. It is a fundamental tenet of data processing that a business-critical application requires its data to be stored close to the compute, memory and servers hosting that applications. That tenet is evolving. As workloads migrate to the cloud, and other workloads migrate the other direction towards the edge, there are increasingly times where data needs to be both stored and processed far away from your data center. I wrote about this recently when talking about why data matters in 2018. This new way of thinking about workload placement naturally requires a fresh examination of data center storage architecture. It’s no longer as simple as connecting storage and compute in neighboring racks to a fibre-channel or 10G-bit Ethernet network and hoping that data is available when it is needed. There is a transformation occurring in how an organization's information architecture influences its data center architecture. At the same time, the responsibilities and needs of an IT staff are changing. In place of teams of specialists focused on a given IT element like storage or virtualization, IT professionals are broadening into roles that benefit from a deeper understanding of data being processed. IT teams of tomorrow need the skills to map the needs to applications to the underlying storage, compute, and networking that serves that data. Data that is both inside and outside the data-center. Below, I’ll give you two examples that demonstrate how data is escaping the data center today, and how those changes are impacting how IT organizations need to think about data. Source: Forbes