Mobile computing, virtualisation and Cloud are contributing to increased datacentre complexity, though A/NZ organisations are managing to keep it under control.
This is according to Symantec’s 2012 State of the Datacentre Survey, which found that 70 per cent of organisations worldwide report increasing complexity in the datacentre.
The global survey looked into the underlying drivers of datacentre complexity and what effect it is having, with the average level of complexity for across all areas companies rating at 6.7 out of 10.
While organisations in the Americas rated complexity the highest at 7.8, in the Asia Pacific and Japan region, which includes Australia and New Zealand, the rating was the lowest at 6.2.
While the low Asia Pacific number is reassuring, it is still only a few points below the national average and indicates that complexity exists in A/NZ.
Rising costs
The most commonly mentioned impact of growing datacentre complexity in the survey was higher costs, with half of the organisations pointing to this issue.
Symantec Pacific region systems engineering senior director, Paul Lancaster, says the increase in costs also applies to organisations in Australia.
“This is a major concern as IT budgets are already under intense pressure,” he said.
“CIOs and IT decision makers need to be wise when implementing their IT infrastructure and completely understand asset utilisation and how exponential data growth impacts them.”
In turn, he expects this will assist with mitigating risk and reducing costs.
More time spent finding information (37 percent), longer lead times for storage migration and provisioning storage (36 percent), reduced agility (35 percent), and security breaches and downtime (31 percent) were other impacts highlighted by respondents.
The key factor behind datacentre complexity in A/NZ included dealing with an increasing number of applications viewed as business-critical, with 67 per cent of Australian respondents pinting to this challenge.
Growth of strategic IT trends such as data growth (43 per cent of respondents), mobile computing and staffing issues (37 per cent), budget shortfalls (36 per cent), and server virtualisation (34 percent) were other factors contributing to complexity.
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