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Data Centers: Companies Losing Battle In Achieving Efficiency
Cloud Computing is gradually chipping away at on-premise infrastructure. Slowly both small and large businesses are moving towards the cloud. Small and medium sized businesses are finding it easy to adopt applications which they never were able to afford as on-premise applications. And big companies are gradually piloting and experimenting with moving some of their data in the cloud to become more efficient and flexible in their operations. At this rate, enough chips and chinks will eventually be taken away from on-premise infrastructure that cloud computing will be considered the norm, rather than an exception.
Another data point was recently published by IBM and IDC recently which adds more evidence to the trend that companies’ in-house efforts to maintain data centers is struggling. On-premise data centers aren’t keeping up with the level of efficiencies that cloud vendors are able to achieve. The main difference, of course is focus. Cloud vendors are in the data center business, while managing a data center is not a core competency for most other businesses. IBM found that 79 percent of companies that maintain their own data centers felt that they are unable to keep current with the changes in technology (62 percent are running their operations at a mildly efficient level while 17 percent lack even basic efficiencies) .
The report found that of the 21 percent of companies that have built highly efficient data centers, more than 50 percent are able to allocate more of their IT budget on new projects and innovation. Many of the efficiencies from these companies are possible using the latest virtualization and storage provisioning technologies.
For the 79 percent of companies that are falling behind in technology, the IBM report suggests the following course of action for how those companies could revamp their data centers:
- Optimize your existing hardware capacity and availability
- Make a plan consistent with your business objectives
- Ensure the plan is flexible enough to support changing objectives
- Adopt automation tools to enable consistent meeting of service levels
Good advice, but creating an efficient data center is hard work.
