Limited Budgets, Growing Storage Needs: APEJ IT Woes

The main infrastructure-related challenge faced by the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) organisations is around storing and managing their data infrastructure, finds the latest “IT Infrastructure in Asia Pacific 2010/11 – End-User Adoption Trends” report from Springboard Research.

Organisations are struggling with a dual challenge of “constrained IT budgets” on one hand and the ever growing need for more storage on another. While limited IT skills availability also remains an ongoing challenge, the respondents consider it secondary and do not currently view it as a major issue. “Given the key concerns, we expect increased investments in data archiving, storage virtualisation, IT security, desktop virtualisation and data de-duplication among Asia Pacific organisations over the next 2-3 years”, said Seepij Gupta, Associate Research Manager, IT Services, Springboard Research.

According to the report, APEJ organisations have a relatively “light” server profile, with only 35% of respondents having more than 25 servers in-house. The report also confirms Microsoft Windows to be the number 1 server operating system in the region, followed by Linux. In terms of clients, 58% of Asia Pacific organisations have more than 250 clients.

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The report also found that the highest percentage of respondents with 500+ clients is either in India or in China. “The research confirms that desktop management remains a major concern for the organisations, primarily due to the vast sprawl. This will drive strong growth opportunities for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and also open up more opportunities for thin clients”, said Fred Giron, VP, IT Services, Springboard Research.

For storage infrastructure, SAN is the most preferred storage type among Asia Pacific organisations, with 60% of respondents (mostly large enterprises with 1000+ employees) having already invested in such technologies. Springboard Research believes that the emergence of cloud based hosting and backup services will drive strong growth in this market over the next 2-3 years.