Data centre outage and complexity matter

MUMBAI, INDIA:· Establish C-level ownership of information governance. Start with high-ROI projects like data loss prevention, archiving and eDiscovery to preserve critical information, find what you need and delete the rest. Get visibility beyond platforms. Understand the business services that IT is providing and all of the dependencies to reduce downtime and miscommunications. Understand what IT assets you have, how they are being consumed, and by whom. This will help cut costs and risk. The organization won't buy servers and storage it doesn't need, teams can be held accountable for what they use, and the company can be sure it isn't running out of capacity.

Also, reduce the number of backup applications to meet recovery SLAs and reduce capital expenses, operating expenses and training costs. Deploy deduplication everywhere to help address the information explosion and reduce the rising costs associated with backing up data.

These are some recommendations from Symantec Corp. that has announced that 79 per cent of organizations globally report increasing complexity in the data center, according to the results of its 2012 State of the Data Center Survey.

The survey, which provides insight into the top challenges organizations are grappling with as the data center continues to transform, highlights the underlying drivers of data center complexity, current impacts on the business, and the latest initiatives IT is adopting to mitigate the issues.

While the cause of data center complexity stems from a variety of factors, respondents identify implementing an information governance strategy as the main initiative being taken to address data center growing pains. The State of the Data Center findings emphasize the importance of taking steps to intelligently manage organizational resources to rein in operational costs and control information growth.

"The data center is transforming beyond recognition, with the introduction of new technologies into everyday business, and these changes can either act as a sail to catch the wind and accelerate growth, or an anchor holding organizations back," said Anand Naik, managing director- Sales, India and SAARC, Symantec. 

Several factors are driving data center complexity. First, respondents reported they are dealing with an increasing number of applications that they consider to be business-critical. A whopping 82 percent of Indian organizations said the number of business-critical applications is increasing or increasing greatly. Other key drivers of data center complexity include the growth of strategic IT trends such as mobile computing (cited by 48 per cent of respondents), server and storage virtualization (47 per cent each), and social media efforts (44 per cent).

The survey revealed that the effects of growing data center complexity are far reaching. The most commonly mentioned impact is higher costs, with 42 percent citing it as an effect of complexity. Other impacts include lost or misplaced data (52 per cent), compliance incidents (51 per cent), downtime (48 per cent) and security breaches (44 percent). Sixty six percent of Indian organizations said they perform somewhat/significantly worse in Disaster Recovery tests because of data center complexity, owing to which over half (53 per cent) respondents have less confidence in their DR plan..

The typical organization globally experienced an average of 16 data center outages in the past 12 months, at a total cost of $5.1 million. The most common cause was systems failures, followed by human error, and natural disasters.