Major cloud providers such as Google, Amazon and Facebook will "gobble up" the competion as smaller providers struggle to compete with what the giants have to offer.
That's what Josko Grljevic, information systems director for TheTrainline.com told Computing ahead of next month's Computing Data Centre Summit, where he's going to be one of many high profile speakers.
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"I think you're going to have a lot more of these mega-data centres, with the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft building massive facilities," he said on the subject of the future of data centres.
"They're probably going to gobble up the smaller guys over time," Grljevic continued, pointing out that the competition will struggle to compete with the low-cost solutions on offer.
"I think you're going to see a bigger push to public cloud, and that's why these guys are building out their data centres. They can provide a really cheap underlying platform and I think it's going to get to the point where you just can't hope to compete with them on cost and provision and flexibility," he said.
However, Grljevic warned that if there are only a handful of cloud solution providers, businesses could end up worse off if they're tied into long-term contracts.
"The issue there is, I think you're probably going to get tied into a few of these providers, and as you get tied in it's going to be very difficult to shift if you're not happy with the service or the quality or anything else that you get with it," he said.
Public cloud adoption is on the rise, as recent research by the Uptime Institute suggests, with almost three in ten businesses deploying the solution in some form.
Next month, Computing is hosting its own Data Centre Summit. The summit will explore how CIOs are successfully navigating the architectural and strategic challenges around the data centre, including a number of panels with focus on adopting cloud technology. It's free to attend for senior IT professionals from end user organisations.
