APAC firms neglect data transformation

SINGAPORE--Companies in Asia-Pacific are turning to transforming their infrastructure and facilities, but neglecting to revitalize their information management, in efforts to better utilize their IT resources.

Michelle Bailey, vice president of enterprise platform and datacenter trends at IDC, said that companies in the region have embraced the "absolute need" to transform their IT processes. That said, there remains ambiguity about the different ways to go about such a change, she added.

The analyst was speaking at the research firm's conference on transformative IT trends and strategies for data centers held here Tuesday.

Elaborating, Bailey noted that there are three tenets of transformative IT for data centers, namely facilities, infrastructure and information. To innovate on facilities, this would involve building a more scalable and modular data center compared to "traditional monolithic, siloed" versions. "Companies should right-size the data facility as they need it rather than provision the whole facility with features such as power and cooling," she said, adding that "Web 2.0 data centers" are modular and designed innovatively with a keen focus on power costs.

As for an infrastructure overhaul, companies would embrace "convergence" of hardware by bringing their server, storage and network resources together, she explained. This will, in turn, ensure an efficient, elastic and flexible framework for companies to spur growth, the analyst said.

So far, Bailey observed that in their IT transformation journey, Asian enterprises have so put "a lot of focus" on infrastructure, followed by facilities.

However, these companies have neglected the analyst's third tenet: information transformation. Bailey defined this as storing, securing and accessing information more efficiently, or in other words, "having access to the right information at the right time". In this regard, "information management is the least transformed" among companies in the region, she stated.

Impact of cloud computing
Beyond these tenets though, the analyst was keen to stress the impact cloud computing will have on datacenter strategies.

This is because as enterprises look to deploy private cloud networks, there will be added impetus to drive datacenter change in areas of automation and converged infrastructure, Bailey explained.

With this in mind, she predicted that "cloud computing and convergence [will] reign for the next 10 years".

Bailey's observations of datacenter transformation corroborates with a separate Gartner report which estimated that by 2018, cloud computing would cause datacenter space requirements to shrink to 40 percent of what is required today. The report attributed this trend to firms moving non-essential tasks to a cloud service provider, thus freeing up floor space and lowering power and cooling costs.