For years, much of the IT press has been filled with talk of Cloud Services.  And at Commercial, we have long provided these. Yet the reality is that for most mid-market companies, traditional onsite IT Infrastructure has remained the core of their IT Services. 

That may be changing. I recently visited the Next Generation Data Centre (NGD) in Newport with a prospective client and was struck by a massive swing towards Cloud that’s starting to open up for the mid-market. 

Our host, Steve Davis of NGD, outlined that deployed racks have increased by 40% in the last year. That’s 40% up on an already impressive number, and the evidence of the weight of investment by big international companies was there for all to see.

In addition, Microsoft’s announcement of UK-only data centres means that clients in legal and professional services requiring data to remain in the UK can now take advantage of Microsoft Azure for production or disaster recovery facilities. 

Commercial Group has grown significantly in recent years, with run-rate revenues at £55m+. The flexibility and professionalism of NGD has been integral to our IT strategy and I can certainly see the same being true for our mid-market clients as they plan three to five years ahead.  My visit to NGD underlined that with new options available, Cloud is moving mainstream for the mid-market.