Adoption of IT outsourcing among businesses is accelerating at a pace that hardly anyone could have predicted, according to the latest report from the Uptime Institute.

The organization, which is responsible for administering Tier I-IV data center certification, found that half of senior enterprise IT executives expect to move the majority of their IT workloads off-premise – either to the public cloud or to be hosted with colocation providers. Out of these, 23 percent said they expect the change to happen by next year.

“The shift is occurring, and our findings show an industry in a state of flux,” said Matt Stansberry, director of Content and Publications for the Uptime Institute.

“The business demand for agility and cost transparency has driven workloads to the public cloud. Our counsel to data center and IT professionals is to become more effective at articulating and showcasing their value to the business.”

Uptime funk

Server room
Is this the beginning of the end for inefficient corporate server rooms? – Thinkstock / Ryan McVay

The Uptime Institute works with organizations across the industry: both those that run their own enterprise data centers, and those that sell data center space to others. Now it has warned that internal IT departments could suffer from the accelerated move off-premise.

For the sixth edition of its Data Center Industry Survey, the Institute spoke to more than 1,000 data center operators and IT practitioners worldwide, and found that legacy enterprise IT departments were shrinking due to budget pressures, advances in hardware and the outsourcing of workloads.

Approximately half of enterprise IT departments reported flat or shrinking of overall budgets, and 55 percent said their enterprise-managed server footprints were also flat or shrinking.

At the same time 50 percent of respondents said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their primary colocation provider, despite the fact that 40 percent had to pay more than they initially expected. Just 7 percent said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the service.

The Institute admitted that results of the previous surveys underestimated the willingness with which businesses would outsource their IT – likely due to omission of resources commissioned without involvement of IT or data center personnel, sometimes called the ‘shadow IT’.

Uptime has advised internal IT departments to emulate service providers by building services that are easy to use, and to take up a greater role in directing corporate governance and evaluating security, costs, and performance of IT for the business – wherever it might reside.