Cloud low on data centre priority list: Survey

NEW YORK, USA: Outsourcing or leasing data centre space is not used widely today, but shows the greatest growth as a model over the next two years.

Cloud SaaS to drive data centre use

This is according to Infonetics Research's report, 'Data Center Deployment Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey'.

Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research, said: “The data centre promises to be a major area of investment and change over the next two years, touching everything from security to servers to storage. For those who are expecting ‘the cloud’ to be a savior of the IT industry, our study is a bit of a reality check: while there is some interest in cloud-based services, particularly on the software side, the majority of respondents have no concrete plans for it."

"Virtualization is the more important trend and technology, as it is a critical tool for organizations to make their infrastructure more efficient and manageable,” he advises.

Security upgrades, both for IT security and physical security, was the #1 change named by respondent organizations when asked what major changes they planned for their data centres over the next two years.

Among respondents planning to use cloud-based services for their data centres, the interest lies primarily in software as a service (SaaS), such as salesforce.com, and cloud-based software applications from Microsoft, Google, and Oracle.

Data centre networks are getting a boost in bandwidth to deal with rising traffic and device numbers: Respondent companies expect the number of 1G Ethernet switch ports to eclipse 100M by 2012.