Businesses will increasingly demand their IT departments to run analytics projects, changing the demands placed on their data center. But more importantly, analytics will also be applied to the data center itself to optimize things like capacity planning and energy consumption, according to the latest industry briefing from DCD Intelligence (DCDi).

The report highlights that many organizations still struggle to understand the benefits big data can generate for their business, but as the time goes by and more case studies emerge, analytics will become a “transformation catalyst” that will open the door to new kinds of ‘data products’, including data marketplaces.

Get comfortable with algorithms

DCDi suggests that analytics will have an impact on every area of data center planning and management, from sustainability measures to infrastructure and software choices.

Some of the possible use cases include using machine-generated data from IT systems to understand server usage and user experience. Analytics can also help prevent and manage performance problems, capacity bottlenecks, unexpected events, and security risks.

Finally, predictive analytics can help anticipate future data center needs: for example increasing data center capabilities through a public cloud when in-house infrastructure is at its limit.

In order to take advantage of this trend, CIOs will have to overcome complexity, costs and manageability issues. Research suggests they will also have to hire more staff, including a new breed of experts in the DevOps team.

To find out more, you can purchase the full industry briefing here.

And of course, all of the current DCDi subscribers will receive the briefing with their regular intelligence package.