Telecoms Will Stay In Cloud Market, Sans Data Centers 

In 2016, many of the incumbent telecoms succumbed to the pressure of cloud industry heavyweights such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft and ditched their once sought-after data center assets in an effort to stay profitable while also staying in the cloud market.

Carrier giants Verizon and CenturyLink sold off data center facilities at the end of 2016. Windstream also sold its physical assets at the end of 2015. But even as more carriers offload their data centers, these providers have no intention of leaving the cloud space.

In 2017, Verizon and Equinix, which picked up Verizon's North and Latin American data center business for $3.6 billion, will offer services for business customers based on the newly-combined product portfolios. CenturyLink also will stay in the cloud in 2017. The provider will continue to offer co-location services through a commercial relationship it will enter into with the consortium that bought its 57 data center facilities for $2.15 billion.