A greater change is coming. If you watch enough of The Walking Dead, you’d think this pertained to something along the lines of a zombie apocalypse threatening the end of the world. But in reality, this statement encompasses something that may not be as gory, but is equally as critical – advancing innovative opportunities in the technological landscape.

For starters, there are quite a few questions pertaining to the relevance, security and innovation of the cloud as well as drivers for innovation in the industry as a whole regarding new markets, revenue generation and the speed of acquiring new and exciting opportunities.

Today at Telx Marketplace Live in New York City, Eric Shepcaro, CEO at Telx; Duncan Puller, VP of cloud services at Sidera; Sean McCarthy, VP at Tata Communications and Barry Tishgart, VP, GM of wholesale services at Comcast, sat down to discuss where innovation is happening today and how it’s being driven.

As mentioned, one area of opportunity for significant growth is in the cloud. The cloud has experienced shifts in adoption that continues to change the way motivators of innovation work, and as a result, enterprise IT seems to be in the middle of some difficult times.

How can businesses keep up?

All of these transformations in the cloud are similarly changing the ways in which enterprises are consuming the cloud, how services are being offered and how the market is adjusting as a whole. Amid this transition, managed hosting remains predominant, as it allows enterprises to uniquely leverage the capabilities happening right now due to the change we’re seeing.

What these four industry-leaders suggest is that we need to work to leverage these shifts and trends, and by using them to our advantage, can ultimately enhance revenue and innovation opportunities.

Shepcaro mentions three trends in the data center industry that can be summarized as the VPP – vocalize data, personalization and proximity. “A big misconception today is that a lot of cloud traffic is going over public networks, when they are really going over private networks,” he explained, adding that he personally believes the network is becoming increasingly important today in that businesses need a network that can move all of their data resources both seamlessly and securely.

He even hints that that a crisis of sorts may be what’s necessary to shake these businesses up to realize they need to make a change.

Needless to say, it wouldn’t be too wise to wait to the point where you have no other choice.

McCarthy mentions that one area for advancing opportunities can be found in data portability. As cloud-to-cloud mobility increases, it’s essential to look toward a future where one day, we can easily move data from the east to the west. “We’re not there yet,” he said, but that the industry is hitting its stride.

Tishgart agrees, noting that today’s mobile lifestyle strongly drives the way we consume data, and has changed what we consume and the way in which we consume it. “It has changed the way we interact with our customers in a major way,” he said, adding that it’s something which should be closely watched as a trend that still has plenty of room to grow.

Another area of focus for advanced opportunities and revenue growth is in the levels of interconnection and utilization of the cloud – namely, its robustness and portability. Tishgart explains that you don’t need to have the compute infrastructure right in the palm of your hands, rather there’s a shift away from complex networks to those where customers are buying their connectivity from their provider of choice, then building it from there.

While this sort of consolidation within various players in the data center market will knock off a lot of new players, it’s what many believe will make the cloud very successful.

Maybe if the fictional TV world listened to these fellas, they wouldn’t have to resort to eating people’s brains.