Three quarters of UK businesses plan to increase their use of third party data centre services to counter the growing cost and complexity of managing highly secure data centers in-house.
According to new research for COLT, a leading European provider of business communications, half of UK businesses are already using some degree of third party data center management today, with 48% planning to increase this immediately - putting demand in the UK ahead of other European countries.
The new survey, conducted by independent firm, Coleman Parkes, questioned 400 IT directors in businesses with more than 500 employees in 13 European countries.
The research revealed the major challenges UK businesses face in managing in-house data centers. The top three were: finding available space (identified by 74% of respondents), followed by security (70%) and managing the building and systems (70%), with power and cost also highlighted. The research also highlighted some specific national differences: power and cooling was a particular challenge in the UK and Portugal (66% and 63% of respondents, respectively, selected this), whilst regulatory compliance was a top three challenge for businesses in Portugal, Italy and Switzerland.
Interestingly, a third of all respondents also identified the need to reduce their carbon footprint as a key challenge, with this figure highest in the UK at 48%.
"The research confirms that environmental considerations are rising up the IT agenda, said Geoffry Gilton, head of products for COLT Managed Services. "We are finding that businesses are increasingly interested in reducing their carbon footprint when looking for a third party data center provider. Cooling, in particular, can account for up to 60% of the energy costs of a data center. As a major data centre operator in Europe, COLT is actively investigating and deploying ways to make our own existing and new centers more energy efficient, such as using free cooling' techniques.
76% of those interviewed in the UK also said that they expect a secondary data center to become a standard requirement for business continuity.
Gilton continued, "Business continuity, regulatory compliance and the sheer growth in IT is driving huge demand for secure data centers at the moment, as shown in this research. Managing data centers has become a major upfront investment and organisational burden for businesses - the level of physical and IT security required is immense so it was not surprising that security came out as the key challenge for UK businesses. This research confirms that there is an overall evolution towards managed services, which we expect to continue as UK businesses turn to third parties to get the security, cost flexibility and skills they need to protect their critical systems.
The research also asked businesses about their use of managed services in general. In two years, almost half of UK businesses expect to use managed services for security, LAN management, database management, server infrastructure management, communications and messaging. In addition, the strongest demand was for high-quality desktop management, with 64% of respondents reporting their intention to adopt a fully managed solution within the next two years.