The pressure to provide speedy services and cut operational costs could drive an over-automation of data centers, according to a report by Computer Weekly.

Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum, told Computer Weekly automation will increase as data center operators automate complex tasks to reduce operational costs.

While automation is a good way of provisioning additional servers "in a matter of seconds", he warned large data centre operators could over-automate to cut costs.

 

"There is a danger of automating too much. Large data centers for the likes of Amazon and Google could be automated to give great economies of scale, saving on people costs. The downside is you don't get much of a SLA [service level agreement]. You've paid for storage but you can't access it because there's a problem and it's been taken offline,"Illsley said.

Illsley said CIOs and data center operators must ensure automated tasks will still be relevant in the long term to avoid lock-in and said the automation of fail over to back up sites and the deletion of data should be avoided.

"Full automation is not necessarily the way everyone should go to. Automate some tasks but make sure you still have humans watching over computers,"he added.