79% Cos Foxed By Increasing Complexity In The DC

Symantec Corp. has announced that 79 percent of organisations report increasing complexity in the datacentre, according to the results of its 2012 State of the Data Center Survey. The survey, which provides insight into the top challenges organisations are grappling with as the datacentre continues to transform, highlights the underlying drivers of datacentre complexity, current impacts on the business, and the latest initiatives IT is adopting to mitigate the issues. While the cause of datacentre complexity stems from a variety of factors, respondents identify implementing an information governance strategy as the main initiative organisations are taking to address datacentre growing pains. The State of the Data Center findings emphasise the importance of taking steps to intelligently manage organisational resources to rein in operational costs and control information growth.

“As today’s businesses generate more information and introduce new technologies into the datacentre, these changes can either act as a sail to catch the wind and accelerate growth, or an anchor holding organisations back,” said Brian Dye, Vice President, Information Intelligence Group, Symantec Corp. “The difference is up to organisations, which can meet the challenges head on by implementing controls such as standardisation or establishing an information governance strategy to keep information from becoming a liability.”

Datacentre Complexity Pervasive

Organisations of all sizes, industries and regions report increasing complexity within the datacentre. According to the survey, datacentre complexity impacts all areas of computing, most notably security and infrastructure, as well as disaster recovery, storage and compliance. Respondents rated complexity across all areas fairly evenly (6.6 or higher out of 10), with security topping the list at 7.1. The average level of complexity for companies around the world was 6.7. On average, organisations in the Americas rated complexity highest, at 7.8, and those in Asia-Pacific/Japan rated it lowest at 6.2.

Effects Of Datacentre Complexity Are Diverse And Costly

Several factors are driving datacentre complexity. First, respondents reported they are dealing with an increasing number of applications that they consider to be business-critical. Sixty-five percent said the number of business-critical applications is increasing or increasing greatly. Other key drivers of datacentre complexity include the growth of strategic IT trends such as mobile computing (cited by 44 percent of respondents), server virtualisation (43 percent), and public cloud (41 percent).

The survey revealed that the effects of growing datacentre complexity are far reaching. The most commonly mentioned impact is higher costs, with nearly half of the organisations citing it as an effect of complexity. Other impacts include reduced agility (39 percent), longer lead times for storage migration (39 percent) and provisioning storage (38 percent), security breaches (35 percent), and downtime (35 percent).

The typical organisation experienced an average of 16 datacentre outages in the past 12 months, at a total cost of $5.1 million. The most common cause was systems failures, followed by human error, and natural disasters.

IT Taking Steps To Alleviate Complexity

According to the survey, organisations are implementing several measures to reduce complexity, including training, standardisation, centralisation, virtualisation, and increased budgets. In fact, 63 percent of respondents consider increasing their budget to be somewhat or extremely important to dealing with datacentre complexity. However, the single biggest initiative organisations are undertaking is to implement a comprehensive information governance strategy, defined as a formal program that allows organisations to proactively classify, retain and discover information in order to reduce information risk, reduce the cost of managing information, establish retention policies and streamline their eDiscovery process. Ninety percent of organisations are either discussing information governance, or have implemented trials or actual programs.

The biggest drivers for information governance include security (rated somewhat or extremely important by 75 percent of respondents), the availability of new technologies that make information governance easier (69 percent), increased datacentre complexity (65 percent), data growth (65 percent), and regulatory and legal issues (61 and 56 percent, respectively).

Organisations have several goals with information governance, including enhanced security (considered important by 75 percent), ease of finding the right information in a timely manner (70 percent), reduced costs of information management (69 percent) and storage (68 percent), reduced legal and compliance risks (65 and 64 percent, respectively), and a move to the cloud (59 percent).

Recommendations

Following are some recommendations that IT can try to mitigate the effects of datacentre complexity.

• Establish C-level ownership of information governance. Start with high-ROI projects like data loss prevention, archiving and eDiscovery to preserve critical information, find what you need and delete the rest.

• Get visibility beyond platforms. Understand the business services that IT is providing and all of the dependencies to reduce downtime and miscommunications.

• Understand what IT assets you have, how they are being consumed, and by whom. This will help cut costs and risk. The organisation won’t buy servers and storage it doesn’t need, teams can be held accountable for what they use, and the company can be sure it isn’t running out of capacity.

• Reduce the number of backup applications to meet recovery SLAs and reduce capital expenses, operating expenses and training costs.

• Deploy deduplication everywhere to help address the information explosion and reduce the rising costs associated with backing up data.

• Use appliances to simplify backup and recovery operations across physical and virtual machines.