Seventy percent of surveyed IT decision-makers across Europe and the Middle East are planning data centre consolidation projects for 2013.
This is according to research by Vanson Bourne, on behalf of Riverbed Technology. The research revealed the major drivers and barriers CIOs face when looking at consolidation.
The Vanson Bourne study highlights that CIOs are recognising the importance of centralising technology and data to become more efficient.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents cited data security as the key driver for consolidation. Other drivers included the desire to reduce the cost of managing distributed servers at the branch office layer (58%), while 49% reported that greater control of application and server upgrades were reasons to consolidate.
While transforming the data centre has the potential to improve cost efficiency and mitigate risk, IT must work to support productivity and revenue growth, the research found. More than half of those questioned highlighted complexity as the biggest obstacle to consolidation. The cost to set up the consolidation plan, in addition to application performance over the WAN, was also reported as concerns by 45% and 38% of respondents, respectively.
According to Riverbed, consolidation and data centre transformation can fundamentally change a business' application delivery environment, making it more reliable. While the cost of change can be high, the overall savings that can be achieved outweighs the costs, the company says.
"Of course, not every application should be moved out of branch offices, but the risks and complications of a distributed application infrastructure can be mitigated. Those few applications that do remain can be virtualised directly on a WAN optimisation appliance and managed remotely with industry standard tools," says Riverbed.
"By ensuring that performance challenges are identified, addressed and managed, organisations can realise greater flexibility in where they locate IT resources. Doing so can mean greater economies of scale, control and security," Riverbed concludes.
For the study, Vanson Bourne questioned 400 CIOs across France, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Poland and the United Kingdom.
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