Cloud, mobile computing and virtualisation increase datacentre complexity

Organisations are struggling to cope with increasing datacentre complexity. Article by Archana Venkatraman.The vast majority (79%) of organisations globally said their datacentres were getting more complex Symantec's 2012 State of the Data Centre Survey found. A rise in business-critical applications (cited by 65%, data growth (51%), mobile computing (44%), server virtualisation (43%) and public cloud (41%) were driving greater complexity in the datacentre environment. Datacentre staff faced challenges in managing all aspects of IT including security and infrastructure, disaster recovery, storage and compliance within the datacentre due to the complexity of the environment, the study further revealed. IT professionals also admitted datacentre complexity also led to increases in costs (47%), security breaches (46%), compliance incidents (43%), litigation exposure (43%) and downtime (41%). Other negative effects of datacentre complexity included reduced agility (41%) and missed SLAs (40%). In terms of unscheduled downtime, on average, a typical organisation experienced around 16 datacentre outages in the last 12 months costing $5.1m (£3.14m) primarily because of system failures followed by human error and natural disasters, the study found.