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The cloud is shaking up nearly every line of business, and the data center itself is not immune. As cloud use grows and data centers find themselves grappling with expanded network use, the data center itself also will be evolving.

A recent piece in Data Center Knowledge highlights five of the biggest ways that the data center will evolve this year.

First, the Internet of Things will play an increasingly large role in overall data center traffic. Cisco (News - Alert) predicts that IoT devices will reach 507.5 billion per year by 2019 at a pace of that saw roughly 42.3 billion new IoT devices added per month in 2014. Data coming from IoT devices will be roughly 269 times more than the amount of data being created and sent to the data center by consumer devices.

Second, software-defined networking (SDN) will pick up its pace as data centers lean on it for flexibility and agility. Gartner (News - Alert) predicts that by the end of 2016, more than 10,000 enterprises worldwide will have deployed SDN in their networks—this is a tenfold rise from 2014. Accordingly, the SDN market for enterprise and cloud service providers will grow from $960 million in 2014 to over $8 billion by 2018, suggests IDC (News - Alert).

“SDN is taking center stage among innovative approaches to some of the networking challenges brought about by the rise of the 3rd Platform, particularly virtualization and cloud computing,” said Rohit Mehra, VP of network infrastructure, at IDC.

Third, security threats against the data center will increase. Next-generation advanced persistent threats will give data centers new headaches this year as physical, logical and human threats make data security ever more of a challenge.

The cost of data center security breaches will increase to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, according to Juniper Research (News - Alert). This is nearly a fourfold increase over estimates of the total cost in 2015.

Fourth, in tandem with the SDN deployment, automation and orchestration within the data center will rise this year. Many automation tools now place governance and advanced policy control directly into their products, making it easier than ever to control security aspects, gain visibility and improve efficiency, among other benefits.

Finally, this year we should see data center economics evolve as architecture convergence takes shape. Hyperconverged integrated systems will represent more than 35 percent of total integrated system market revenue by 2019, according to Gartner. We’ll see more use cases for hyperconvergence emerge this year and more technologies pushing it forward.

As with every other area of our lives, the data center community is not immune to the impact of the cloud.