Most of us have figured out “the cloud” is not a giant hard drive in the sky. So where does all that data go? Where is it stored? It is stored in massive data centers — which typically house tens of thousands of servers — located around the world, of course.

The advantage of the cloud is you can access your information on any device with an Internet connection. Remote servers handle much of the computing and storage, so users do not need to invest in additional hardware.

The migration of data and information storage to the cloud and the growing movement of business processing to a cloud-based model have brought data centers into the real estate spotlight.

Cisco forecasts that global data center traffic will triple by 2017 to 7.7 zettabytes, a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent. (A zettabyte is equal to 1 sextillion bytes, or approximately 1,000 exabytes.) If you are in real estate, the only thing you need to understand is the demand for data cente