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Companies are being forced to re-evaluate their approach to data centre management and their entire IT infrastructure to meet the demands of customers becoming increasingly used to 'always-on' connectivity.
This is according to Bryn Jones of CommScope, who used the recent Pokemon Go phenomenon to highlight the impatience of today's data users and how they don't want to wait to experience the latest trends, calling it a "wake-up call" for organisations across Europe.
"They need to get up to speed quickly, especially when appealing to younger age groups, who impatiently demand the latest technology at their fingertips at all times," he pointed out.
The latest figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau show that the average Briton now spends three hours and eight minutes a day online, considerably more than they spend watching television. Increasingly, they are consuming content on platforms such as Netflix and YouTube, which require good-quality infrastructure to be delivered effectively.
Mr Jones commented: "To deliver these expectations, organisations are reviewing all aspects of their IT infrastructure, including on-premise, colocation and cloud solutions. Changes in architecture will have profound implications on data centre networking and design."
The expert went on to say that it isn't just larger companies that need the IT infrastructure to support high levels of demand for their services, as even banks or universities are part of the phenomenon that sees people wanting information immediately.
And with reliance on the internet set to grow, this is unlikely to change any time soon. A recent Nature article highlighted that with global internet traffic growing by 22 per cent per year, "the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it".
It explained that with everything from fitness trackers and fridges to virtual reality headsets now coming online via the 'internet of things', data from mobile devices alone is growing by 53 per cent a year, leading to a demand for bandwidth provision in the tens of billions of bits per second.
However, Mr Jones added it is important to ensure flexibility when designing data centres, as demand will not necessarily be consistent. For example, he used the example of a newly released computer game played online to illustrate how more bandwidth will be needed immediately after the release date than will be necessary six months later when some of the novelty has worn off.
For this reason, he said, many more companies are adopting the public cloud than was the case before when opinion of it was still "quite nervous".
It suggests that companies that are failing to embrace the latest developments in data centre design could not only fall behind their competitors, but also be less well-received by their increasingly impatient customers.
