AS more companies move away from investing in their own data centres and become more reliant on third-party services, there will be increased demand for data centre space by cloud service and hosting providers in the Asia-Pacific region, believes Digital Realty Trust.

Company CEO Michael Foust told BizIT that corporate IT departments were increasingly looking at outsourcing options to reduce their operational management of day-to-day data centre responsibilities. In turn, they are focusing their attention on business apps that might have a transformational effect on the overall business instead, he noted.

This was one reason he gave for the uptick in data centre leasing activity in the second half of the year. There was "unexpectedly slow" business for the US-headquartered company in the first half, but corporate IT departments' move for outsourcing deals drove the "great uptake" in the latter half, particularly in North America and Asia-Pacific, he revealed.