A year or so ago there were over 500 hyperscale data centre in existence worldwide and a further 170 or more in the pipeline, according to Synergy Research. But the explosion in cloud adoption – public and private – is not only driving demand for hyperscale data centres. Fuelled by the IoT and the arrival of 5G, the ongoing decentralisation of the cloud is also contributing hugely to the growing shift towards distributed ‘edge’ computing.

Edge cloud environments are now...