Bits and bytes are the basics of our business, and business is good. So much so that even the immense capacity of advanced data centers can’t keep up with demand. And complexity? Off the charts. Now the question is, does continuing to manage your own data center facilities make financial sense?
The enterprise-owned glass house is alive and well: Our survey shows just 4% of respondents aggressively moving applications to the public cloud, and another 4% of survey respondents expect demand for data center resources to decrease, compared with 69% expecting increases. Many are girding for upticks of 25% or more. At that pace, enterprises can’t further virtualize or build new facilities fast enough to keep up, even if they could afford to — which many can’t, given that spending on data center facilities and associated infrastructure is little changed year over year.
After you’ve consolidated existing facilities and servers to the limit, what then?
To get more done with the same physical resources and people, CIOs might look to such cutting-edge technologies as self-service private clouds; software-defined networks and storage; and high-density, low-power servers. They can off-load commodity IT services such as email, unstructured data backup and public-facing websites to public cloud and software-as-a-service providers. But is that enough, given how fast demand for application resources, storage, network capacity and services is rising?