Frost & Sullivan: Invest in Data Centres for Security
In analyst group Frost & Sullivan’s report, Cloud Computing Research: 2011, A Strategic Analysis of the Australian Data Centre Infrastructure and Services Market, the company finds that security is the number one issue for Australian IT leaders.
High profile hacking incidents and data breaches along with newer trends such as enterprise mobility and social media are the root of the security issues, the report finds, and that challenges include the need to manage heterogeneous virtualisation and storage platforms while grappling with a lack of portability and unified management tools, and capacity planning without being able to accurately estimate demand.
Frost & Sullivan found that 27% of all organisations have outsourced hosting of their data centre infrastructure to third party service providers. Arun Chandrasekaran, Research Director, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan stated that adoption rates differ according to the size of organisation, with mid-market companies showing a lower adoption rate of 18%. “This compares to one third of large enterprises that say they are using hosted facilities due to reasons such as high availability, cost advantages and robust disaster recovery,” he explained.
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The report also found that 41% of IT decision makers believe that cloud computing is a top priority for them in the current financial year. To date public cloud services have experienced the highest adoption rates, however private clouds are gaining in popularity due to their ability to combine the virtualisation, automation and pay-as-you-go benefits of public clouds and the enterprise-grade requirements for security, reliability and service level agreements. The study notes that increased server virtualisation and investment in network security will help to underpin additional adoption of private cloud environments.
Frost & Sullivan predicts storage, servers and virtualisation will be the areas in which most customers increase spending in the current financial year.
It also expects server expenditure to be driven by the need to accommodate media and data centre consolidation, resulting in workloads shifting from head offices and branches to the data centre itself.
“The data centre market is evolving and we expect to see some shrinkage in the number of low-end outsourced service providers over the next few years as companies turn towards utility-priced, scalable managed hosting and cloud services that require a lower investment in equipment and personnel,” Chandrasekaran said.