Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 09 | Page 56

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres Results of the 2016 Data Centre Industry Survey by Uptime Institute U ptime Institute has announced the results of the 2016 Uptime Institute Data Centre Industry Survey. The sixth annual survey provides an overview of the major trends shaping IT infrastructure delivery and strategy. According to survey findings, 50% of senior enterprise IT executives expect the majority of IT workloads to reside off-premise in cloud or colocation sites in the future. Of those respondents 70% expect that shift to occur by 2020, and 23% expect the shift will 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 Uptime Institute. “We saw the trends lining up beginning with our 2013 survey, noting that enterprise IT teams were not effectively 58 INTELLIGENTCIO communicating data centre cost and performance metrics to their C-level executives. The business demand for agility and cost transparency has driven workloads to the public cloud. Our counsel to data centre and IT professionals is to become more effective at articulating and showcasing their value to the business.” Uptime Institute Survey findings since 2013 have shown that the majority of respondents report some percentage of their IT portfolio resides outside of their enterprise-owned data centres, either in the cloud or some form of off-premise computing. But the annual Data Centre Industry Survey takes the pulse of the legacy, on-premise enterprise IT and data centre operations teams, many of which are not motivated or inclined to move to cloud. Previous results likely underrepresented the shift to cloud computing, as business units deployed in the cloud without IT Operations or Data Centre personnel involvement. IT as a whole needs to move away from its current role as a slow-moving centralised provider, and instead direct corporate governance across the various business lines – evaluating security, costs, and performance of IT for the business. Additionally, legacy enterprise IT groups need to develop clearer messages to the business to articulate their value and efficacy. Enterprise related findings include: • Many legacy enterprise IT departments are shrinking, due to budget pressures, IT hardware advances and the outsourcing of www.intelligentcio.com