Cloud Outages & Costs, AI Adoption, Data Center Growth: All Trends Rocketing into 2026
For most business leaders, the holidays provide the downtime to take stock of your successes and challenges of the past year while planning your strategies for the year ahead.
Your technology strategy will likely be top-of-mind in 2026. Rapid changes in the IT landscape, predominantly driven by AI, have created a bewildering variety of new technologies to evaluate and incorporate. Future winners and losers in entire industries will likely be decided by the technology decisions being made at this moment.
Key areas to focus on for success in 2026 and beyond include:
Public Cloud Reliability: In the fourth quarter alone, multiple major cloud providers have had outages that have left millions of users (including unwitting downstream victims) in the dark. Whether AWS, , Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure, (and we chose to just link to a single one of each of those service providers multiple Q4 outages) or others, many companies have learned the hard way that their public cloud providers are the single source of failure that they thought they were escaping by outsourcing to these global giants.
Public Cloud Expense and Security: Many enterprises are suffering sticker shock from their monthly AWS bills and doing damage control from cloud data breaches. Meanwhile taking full advantage of the cloud requires highly specialized IT staff, which is expensive to train and difficult to retain.
AI Adoption: AI promises to transform our economy as much as the rise of commercial internet did around the turn of the 21st Century. However, even some companies with the most skilled AI practitioners working with unfathomable budgets are struggling to make AI adoption a profitable endeavor. Is there promise? Certainly, but a highly disciplined, ROI-focused AI strategy is crucial.
Aging Corporate Data Centers: Our region has long been a center of innovation, with much early adoption of technology. As a result, an onsite Y2K-era data center with an expected lifecycle of 15-20 years that is still in operation is fairly typical. Most likely, that data center is the wrong size for current needs and probably lacks the mechanical and electrical upgrades necessary to maximize uptime. Staffing, compliance, security, operations, and upgrades are only getting more costly and difficult to implement.
Strained Data Center Capacity: A recent industry overview concludes that there is a 1.5% vacancy rate for data center space while nearly all new data center builds are for hyperscalers operating at massive capacity. The typical enterprise customer is no longer the target market for data center developers.
These issues and more are discussed in white papers and executive reports that you can read here, here, here, and here.
Additionally, we are having conversations on these and other concerns daily with customers, some of these are firms we’ve helped guide (while learning from them as well) into the future for almost 20 years. We’d welcome a conversation about your plans for the future and your strategies to execute them. Email strategy@directLTx to arrange for a call and a data center tour if desired.
Happy holidays and all the best to everyone as Tech Year 2026 beckons.