October 03, 2012  The numbers are in, and no matter how you
slice and dice the metrics, they don't look good. Whether it's
the declining revenues of capital markets firms, the cost of
energy or the underutilization of servers, the numbers do not
paint a pretty picture for the future of the data center.  While
there always will be a place for data centers in the financial
services industry, the role of the traditional corporate data
center is changing. Firms still can gain certain competitive
advantages from maintaining and running their own data centers,
such as latency reductions. And, in an industry that has
collectively been under regulatory scrutiny for decades, firms
still require top-flight security on customer and corporate
data. (As the saying goes: You can't outsource security, risk
and compliance oversight.)  But the cost to run a proprietary
data center just to maintain security and competitive advantages
for certain applications will soon become too much to bear -- if
it hasn't become so already.