Analyst, Frost & Sullivan, claims local datacentre security should be considered an investment instead of as a cost.
In a new report, Cloud Computing Research: 2011, A Strategic Analysis of the Australian Data Centre Infrastructure and Services Market, the company finds that even though security issues top the list of datacentre concerns, many businesses are failing to make adequate investments in people, processes and technology to redress the issue.
The report found that only 27 per cent of organisations have outsourced hosting of their datacentre infrastructure to third party service providers.
Frost & Sullivan research director of ICT practice, Arun Chandrasekaran, said the adoption rates differed with the size of organisation – with mid-market companies showing a lower adoption rate of 18 per cent.
“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 said.
The report also showed that server and storage virtualisation is the primary datacentre investment priority for organisations right now but, its adoption remains slow and steady.
Other operational challenges include the need to manage heterogeneous virtualisation and storage platforms while dealing with a lack of portability and unified management tools and capacity planning without the ability to accurately estimate demand.
Frame Group director, Karl Medak, said datacentres had been elevated to the business criticality that most executives in the past looked at as their core business; in financial terms, they were now elevated to that level depending on how much they rely on datacentres.
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 datacentre consolidation, resulting in workloads shifting from head offices and branches to the datacentre itself.
“The dat 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.
Businesses outsourcing datacentre requirements will gravitate towards providers who offer the latest cooling techniques, stringent security controls and power specifications capable of supporting the latest generation of high-performance computers, he said.
However, Medak said, “The best way for businesses to embrace datacentre security is not by being dragged into it but rather when they see a benefit in it.”
Another study by Frost &Sullivan showed Australia as the leading adopter of cloud computing in Asia-Pacific.
