Symantec state of the data center survey results: not surprising, but useful

Danny Milrad, Symantec's Director of Product Marketing, Information Management Group, and Mike Reynolds, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Storage and High Availability Group, took the time to brief me on a "state of the data center" survey Symantec has fielded for a number of years. The results were both interesting and not at all surprising.

The following bullets discuss a few of the results:

• All geographic regions report that their data centers are complex places having many different types of technology and many different systems in place. Respondents reported the highest levels of complexity in Latin America and North America. Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific regions reported much lower levels complexity.
• The reasons cited for this increasing complexity are: increasing number of business critical workloads, the growth in the size of data that must be managed, mobile computing, server virtualization, budget shortfalls, and use of the public cloud.
• Some of the impacts increasing complexity cause are: increased costs; long lead times for both storage migration and storage provisioning; reduced agility; more time finding information; security breaches; lost data; down time; compliance issues; missing service level guidelines; and greater exposure to litigation.

The report went on to suggest that C-level executives need to lead data compliance efforts; that IT organizations gain greater visibility into workloads and go beyond just looking at platforms; IT organizations need to better understand their entire portfolio of workloads and IT resources; Reduce the number of backup applications in use and deploy deduplication tools when and wherever possible.

While none of these findings and suggestions are surprising, the study and its recommendations do point out important issues facing IT organizations today.