Bangkok--13 Dec--Oasis Media
Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that 79 percent of organizations report increasing complexity in the data center, according to the results of its 2012 State of the Data Center Survey. The survey, which provides insight into the top challenges organizations globally and in Thailand are grappling with as the data center continues to transform, highlights the underlying drivers of data center complexity, current impacts on the business, and the latest initiatives IT is adopting to mitigate the issues. While the cause of data center complexity stems from a variety of factors, respondents identify implementing an information governance strategy as the main initiative organizations are taking to address data center growing pains. The State of the Data Center findings emphasize the importance of taking steps to intelligently manage organizational resources to rein in operational costsand control information growth
“As today’s businesses in Thailand generate more information and introduce new technologies into the data center, these changes can either act as a sail to catch the wind and accelerate growth, or an anchor holdingorganizations back,” said Pramut Sriwichian, Symantec’s country manager for Thailand. “The difference is up to organizations, which can meet the challenges head on by implementing controls such as standardization orestablishing an information governance strategy to keep information from becoming a liability.”
Data Center Complexity Pervasive
Organizations of all sizes, industries and regions report increasing complexity within the data center. According to the survey, data center complexity impacts all areas of computing, most notably security andinfrastructure, as well as disaster recovery, storage and compliance. Respondents globally rated complexity across all areas fairly evenly (6.6 or higher out of 10), with security topping the list at 7.1. The average levelof complexity for companies around the world was 6.7. On average, organizations in the Americas rated complexity highest, at 7.8, and those in Asia-Pacific/Japan rated it lowest at 6.2.
Effects of Data Center Complexity are Diverse and Costly
Several factors are driving data center complexity. First, respondents reported they are dealing with an increasing number of applications that they consider to be business-critical. Globally, 65 percent said the number of business-critical applications is increasing or increasing greatly. In Thailand, 95 percent of companies stated that the number of business-critical applications is increasing or increasing greatly. Otherkey drivers of data center complexity in Thailand include the growth of strategic IT trends such as growth in the volume of data (cited by 54 percent of respondents), public cloud computing (49 percent), server anddesktop virtualization (46 percent each), and private cloud computing (46 percent).
The survey revealed that the effects of growing data center complexity in Thailand are far reaching. The most commonly mentioned impact in Thailand is a longer time to find information, with nearly half (47 percent) of the organizations in Thailand citing it as an effect of complexity. Other impacts include longer lead times for provisioning storage (40 percent), storage migration (36 percent), reduced agility (36 percent), securitybreaches (36 percent), lost or misplaced data (36 percent), increased costs (35 percent), downtime (35 percent), and litigation exposure (33 percent).
Globally, the typical organization experienced an average of 16 data center outages in the past 12 months, at a total cost of US$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, organizations in Thailand are implementing several measures to reduce complexity, including standardizing security, additional staff training, standardizing hardware, increasing budgets, and embracing cloud computing. In fact, 69 percent of respondents in Thailand consider increasing their budget and having more staff training (73 percent) to be somewhat or extremely important to dealing with data center complexity. However, the single biggest initiative organizations in Thailand are undertaking is to implement a comprehensive information governance strategy, defined as a formal program that allows organizations 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 five percent of organizations in Thailand are either discussing information governance, or have implemented trials or actual programs.
The biggest drivers for information governance in Thailand include security (rated somewhat or extremely important by 77 percent of respondents), the availability of new technologies that make information governance easier (62 percent), regulatory issues (56 percent), increased data center complexity (55 percent), legal issues (46 percent), and the growth of data (43 percent).
Organizations in Thailand have several goals with information governance, including enhanced security (considered important by 74 percent), setting protection to match the value of data (71 percent), ease of finding the right information in a timely manner (68 percent), reduced costs of information management and storage (63 percent each), and reduced legal and compliance risks (60 percent each).
Symantec recommendations
The following are some recommendations that organizations can try to take in order to mitigate the effects of data center 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 organization 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.
Symantec’s 2012 State of the Data Center Survey
Symantec’s 2012 State of the Data Center Survey was conducted by ReRez Research in March 2012. The results are based on responses from 2,453 IT professionals at organizations in 34 countries, including 100 organizations from Thailand. Respondents included senior IT staff focused on operations and tactical functions, as well as staff members focused on planning and IT management.
Resources
Blog: State of the Data Center Survey Reveals Increasing IT Complexity
Infographic: State of the Data Center
SlideShare: 2012 State of the Data Center Survey
Blog Post: State of the Data Center Survey Reveals Increasing IT Complexity
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