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Five Reasons Why a Modern Data Centre Strategy Is Needed for the Digital World: Gartner

Announcement posted by Gartner 15 Apr 2015

15 April 2015 -- Digital business is putting pressure on IT executives to change the structure and role of data centres, according to a report from Gartner, Inc.
 
According to Gartner, investment in the Nexus of Forces (cloud, social, mobile and data) and the Internet of Things will accelerate over the next five years. The rapid increase in the number and type of hardware devices that data centres need to support and integrate will grow exponentially over the next five years. Digital business will create the need for contradictory modes of service delivery, referred to as bimodal data centre service delivery. Without adapting and changing, many IT departments will be bypassed for new projects, the report said.
 
"For over 40 years, data centres have pretty much been a staple of the IT ecosystem," said Rakesh Kumar, managing vice president at Gartner. "Despite changes in technology for power and cooling, and changes in the design and build of these structures, their basic function and core requirements have, by and large, remained constant. These are centred on high levels of availability and redundancy, strong, well-documented processes to manage change, traditional vendor management and segmented organisational structures. This approach, however, is no longer appropriate for the digital world."
 
In a new report, Gartner gives five reasons why organisations need to develop a more appropriate and modern data centre strategy:
 
To Make the Data Centre Behave More Like a Factory and a Laboratory
By 2020, more than seven billion people and businesses, and close to 35 billion devices, will be connected to the Internet. This will result in a significant increase in the speed and volume of data that needs to be handled by data centres. In this sense, data centres will need to behave like theoretical factories with production lines that can scale up to handle ever-increasing volumes of work.
 
They will also be expected to churn through huge volumes of data to connect applications and allow for better real-time analytics. Therefore, certain parts of the data centre need to behave like a laboratory, forensically analysing this vast ocean of data to provide insight and actions for the business.
 
To Manage the Pressure on the Data Centre to Become Agile and Innovative
The disruption triggered by digital business is fluid and nonstop, with the potential for massive innovation driving significant changes in IT service delivery. In order to deal with these rapid changes, become agile and, at the same time, maintain process-driven integrity and safety of existing systems, many organisations have begun operating in two modes or speeds of IT. Gartner calls this "bimodal IT."
 
As the core engine delivering IT services, the data centre will need to become far more agile and responsive than it has ever been and operate in a bimodal way. Without adapting the mentality and approach of data centres away from continuous stability to managed change and innovation, data centre managers will find it increasingly difficult to prove their value.
 
To Manage Different Types of Risk
Data centres will face a significant increase in risk as they move toward a more open and hybrid model.
Digital business will not only see a huge number of devices connected, but will also see data centres as the focal point of these connections. Traditionally, data centres have focused on risk management, which is normally associated with downtime, system availability and application-centric breaches. Data centre strategies fit for the digital world must have a key focus on a broad approach to risk management. Another important risk for many digital business transactions is that no single entity will own availability and performance service levels for the complete end-to-end transaction. This will create a whole new set of service assurance challenges.
 
To Make the Data Centre Part of a Broader Hybrid Topology
Traditionally, IT spending has been through IT departments with data centres delivering IT services. This is rapidly changing. Currently, 38 percent of total IT spend is outside of IT, with a disproportionate amount in digital projects; by 2017, it will be more than 50 percent. Lines of businesses will spend with cloud and third-party service providers if they feel their data centre is either too slow to respond or too closed to new technologies. As a result, infrastructure and operations leaders must ensure that their internal data centres are able to connect into a broader hybrid topology.
 
To Embrace New Technologies in a Different Way
The digital world is bringing a host of new technologies that will need to be managed differently in data centres. At the edge, there will be mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, which will need the operational control of data centres, such as software configurations, standardised operating environments and security patching.
 
At the same time, there will be changes in the more traditional data centre hardware of servers, storage and network equipment, forcing data centre managers to rethink their procurement, management and support strategies. Yet another change will be in vendor relationships. The digital world is reshaping the vendor landscape and the technologies and vendors that have traditionally been instrumental in strong data centre services are going through changes, meaning infrastructure and operations leaders will need to reshape their strategy for providing IT services.
 
Additional information is provided in the Gartner report "Five Reasons Why You Need a Different Data Centre Strategy for the Digital World." The report provides rankings and market share for the top 10 vendors. The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/document/3015422.
 
Data centre strategies will be discussed at the Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Centre Summit 2015 on May 11-12 in Mumbai, May 18-19 in Sydney, Australia.
 
About Gartner
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. The company delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the valuable partner to clients in approximately 10,000 distinct enterprises worldwide. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, USA, and has 6,800 associates, including more than 1,500 research analysts and consultants, and clients in 90 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.
 
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