Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For more than a decade, the prevailing wisdom in enterprise IT was simple: move everything to the public cloud. Hyperscale platforms promised unlimited scalability, lower costs, agility and freedom from the burdens of managing infrastructure. Cloud-first has been rapidly gaining momentum as the de facto path to a modern digital footprint. Until now.

UK data centre occupancy hit 91% in 2024, according to Arizton market data, and new capacity is not arriving fast enough to close the gap. Grid connection wait times for new projects now run between five and 15 years, reports Data Center Dynamics, and Savills has attributed the 11% year-on-year drop in new capacity delivery to power constraints rather than a lack of demand or investment. Rising wholesale energy costs are addingpressure to an already tight market.

Ask an operations team where the week went, and you'll usually get a list of things that shouldn't have needed a person. Access requests provisioned by hand. A disk cleared for the ninth time this quarter. Certificates rotated one at a time because the renewal script was scoped, estimated, and never finished. None of it is difficult, and all of it is necessary. And at the end of the quarter there's nothing to point at, because the work left no trace beyond the absence of an outage.