Half of those polled in the latest cloudy survey have said they will “definitely” look to expand their data centres in the coming year, with the vast majority of remaining respondents claiming they will expand in 2014.

The survey, commissioned by data bods Digital Realty Trust and conducted by Campos Research and Analysis, spoke to 300 IT execs and concluded that this explosion in data centre usage was primarily down to the proliferation of private clouds.

Three in five (61%) cited an internal cloud as an “extremely important reason” for expansion, with the main data centre driver being security (67%).

Other interesting drivers noted in the top 10 were disaster recovery (62%), new apps and services (61%) and virtualisation (57%).

The most popular place to build a new data centre is New York, according to the research, with 65% of those surveyed citing the most interest in the Big Apple …