May 6, 2017 - The Uptime Institute has just released the results of its annual Data Centre Industry Survey. This survey examines the key trends and developments shaping the IT infrastructure industry today. The results reveal that while the majority of IT organisations are moving some of their workloads to the cloud, the percentage of them residing in in-house data centres has remained stable at around 65% since 2014. The bottom line is that with the explosive growth of data and mission-critical applications, enterprises continue to view the data centre as not only a very important piece, but an essential element of their digital strategies.
The results also show several key trends that together act as powerful catalysts for change in the industry. These include the rise in processor performance, the expansion of server virtualisation and the adoption of cloud computing. Together they are creating the foundation for today's IT solutions that are quite different from those of five years ago. Throughout this change, DCs have remained central to the consolidation of these strategies.
In addition, the report urges IT and CD professionals to focus their management on the business, creating repeatable processes that make their work more efficient, while adopting new technologies and solutions when business needs them.
Summary of some of the findings of the study:
- Substantial budgets for CD. Compared to 2016, almost 75% of companies' CD budgets have been increased or maintained for this year.
- IT operations continue to be primarily performed in in-house and/or outsourced DCs. On average, almost two-thirds of IT assets are deployed on in-house DCs, with 22% on outsourced DCs (colocation) and only 13% in the cloud.
- IT availability is increasing, complementing redundancy. The majority of companies (68%) have high IT availability architectures. This is achieved through the use of multiple, geographically distributed DCs and automatic application failover systems. At the same time, 73% of companies said they had no plans for new DCs with low physical redundancy.
- Outages matter. More than 90% of IT and DC professionals believe their company's management is more concerned about incidents and outages this year than last year.
- Metrics and business. Most organisations (90%) conduct root cause analysis of any IT failure, yet only 60% reported that they have systems in place to measure the cost to the business of outages.
More information on this report is available here.