The study found that respondents believe they are facing management challenges as data center complexity increases, with more than a third of managers surveyed saying that too many applications and data center complexity are impediments to staff productivity.

There is also an apparent gap in planning: again, around 30% say existing data center forward strategic planning is either undocumented or needs work, with “important areas left out of the plan [such as] virtual servers, remote offices and cloud computing”.

Finally, many IT managers believe their organisations are understaffed and that many are in need of developing better and more clearly defined disaster recovery plans.

Most enterprises have 10 or more data center initiatives rated as “somewhat” or “absolutely” important, and half expect “significant” changes to their data centers in 2010. A similar proportion complain that applications are growing somewhat quickly and are finding it difficult and costly to meet service level agreements.

Adding to the complexity is the continued increase in data, causing 71% of organisations to consider data reduction technologies as a means of coping.

The data comes from the Symantec 2010 State of the Data Center report’s findings, based on November 2009 surveys of 1,780 data center managers in 26 countries (of which 573 were in EMEA). The study considers companies with fewer than 2,000 employees to be small enterprises and companies with 10,000 or more employees to be large.

Another key finding was that business drivers for IT departments, such as security, back-up and recovery and continuous data protection, remain heartland issues – ahead of virtualisation and the cloud.

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Keywords: Data center, service level agreements, employees, virtual servers, remote offices, cloud computing