BANGALORE, INDIA: As the amount of data proliferates across all industries, organizations of all types are challenged with optimizing their data centre operations. Since data is at the very heart of most businesses, it benefits organizations to develop a strategy to deal with their data centres.

Wipro Technologies, the consulting, system integration and outsourcing arm of Wipro Limited, along with Outsourcing Center, an Alsbridge company, announced the findings of a survey conducted on data center optimization, at the Gartner Data Center Conference being held in Las Vegas.

The key findings of the survey are:

Data center strategies (IT infrastructure, applications, network and facility) clearly impact businesses. The participants seem to agree that a data center strategy impacts their organization's business. While more than half of participants (53.1 per cent) said that they believe a data centre strategy impacts their business, only a scant 15.6 per cent of participants said that such a strategy has no impact on their organization.

Most organizations operate from multiple data centres but owned fewer than half of their data centres. According to the survey, a majority of organizations currently operate from more than just one or two data centres.

More than two in five participants (41.9 per cent) said they operate from three, four or five data centres. More than 10 per cent of participants (12.9 per cent) said they operate from more than 20 data centres. More than half of survey participants (56.2 per cent) said that they owned fewer than half of their data centres.

Most organizations do not know the detailed cost breakdown of each data centre. A whopping 71.9 per cent -- nearly three-fourths -- of all survey participants reported that they do not know the detailed cost breakdown of each data centre. And most organizations only know a portion of their data centre costs -- not the whole cost picture.

Fewer than half of organizations have adopted alternative models for data centre management. The participants in the survey were about evenly split on their adoption of alternative models for data centre management, although slightly fewer (46.9 per cent) said they have not yet adopted these models to manage their data centres.

Lack of measurable return-on-investment is holding organizations back from moving to alternate data centre management models. A majority of participants in the survey cited lack of measurable ROI as a challenge they face in moving to alternative data management models. However, since organizations don't know their costs, they can't really gauge how, or whether or not, the alternative models are benefitting them in terms of cost.

The cost of such an initiative and lack of necessary budget was identified by 22.6 per cent of participants.

The survey also points out new approaches to the data center can provide organizations of all types with myriad benefits. By standardizing, consolidating, virtualizing and automating processes, organizations can transform their data centres to be lean and energy efficient.
Transforming the data centre can enable growth, minimize risk, increase speed and agility, and lead to dramatic cost reductions.