Infotech Lead India: 48 percent of Indian organizations say mobile computing is the top driver of data center complexity, according to a Symantec survey.
79 percent of organizations globally report increasing complexity in the data center.
Respondents identify implementing an information governance strategy as the main initiative being taken to address data center growing pains.
“The data center is transforming beyond recognition, with the introduction of new technologies into everyday business, and these changes can either act as a sail to catch the wind and accelerate growth, or an anchor holding organizations back,” said Anand Naik, managing director- Sales, India and SAARC, Symantec.
According to the survey, data center complexity impacts all areas of computing, most notably security and infrastructure, as well as disaster recovery, storage and compliance.
Indian respondents rated complexity across all areas fairly evenly (4 or higher out of 10) with security topping the list. 52 percent of respondents rated complexity of storage at 5 or more and 53 percent gave a similar rating for security. The average rating for level of complexity for companies around the world was 6.7.
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. 82 percent of Indian organizations said the number of business-critical applications is increasing or increasing greatly.
Other key drivers of data center complexity include the growth of strategic IT trends such as mobile computing (cited by 48 percent of respondents), server and storage virtualization (47 percent each), and social media efforts (44 percent).
The effects of growing data center complexity are far reaching. The most commonly mentioned impact is higher costs, with 42 percent citing it as an effect of complexity.
Other impacts include lost or misplaced data (52 percent), compliance incidents (51 percent), downtime (48 percent) and security breaches (44 percent). Sixty six percent of Indian organizations said they perform somewhat/significantly worse in Disaster Recovery tests because of data center complexity, owing to which over half (53 percent) respondents have less confidence in their DR plan.
The typical organization globally experienced an average of 16 data center 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.
Organizations are implementing several measures to reduce complexity, including training, standardization, centralization, virtualization, and increased budgets. However, 50 percent of Indian organizations indicated they lack budgets to deal with data complexity.
The single biggest initiative organizations 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 six percent of organizations 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 (65 percent of respondents), the availability of new technologies that make information governance easier (58 percent), increased data center complexity (61 percent), data growth (39 percent), and regulatory issues (58 percent).
Organizations have several goals with information governance, including enhanced security (considered important by 52 percent), ease of finding the right information in a timely manner (57 percent), reduced costs of information management (52 percent) and storage (54 percent), reduced legal and compliance risks (53 and 48 percent, respectively), and a move to the cloud (50 percent).
