Last year, the conversation at the inaugural infra // STRUCTURE summit focused on the disruptive nature of hyperscale cloud and how this is happening on a global basis. Hyperscale has spawned a new breed of provider and a rapidly transforming supporting ecosystem. Service offerings have changed, business models have been adjusted and in many ways, the entire premise of the business has been turned on its head.

The shifts are plain to see. Managed hosters and infrastructure service providers have retreated from commodity cloud services and jumped to the managed third party cloud model. Meanwhile, the colocation sector has arguably made an even bigger pivot. Wholesale colocation serving hyperscale is basically a category in and of itself, while retail colocation has taken a sharp turn towards interconnection. Colocation is no longer just about housing infrastructure, but enabling it. And enabling means getting end users to the cloud and the applications and content they access deployed across increasingly complex hybrid architectures.

A hybrid world with hyperscale at the centre is the future. It is undeniably where things are moving. But it is also quickly becoming clear that things are not quite that simple. The Internet continues to grow and there is a new generation of applications emerging that take end users further out than ever before, while at the same time, demanding unprecedented levels of latency and performance.