The commercial data center industry is booming. The combination of cloud computing, a growing colocation market, increased awareness of backup needs and growing familiarity with IT outsourcing is creating new demand for third-party data center resources. As data center hosting vendors respond to these trends, the need for more advanced and complex facilities is growing. As data centers become more sophisticated, business process management software can enable improvement to maintenance, management and regulatory compliance.
According to a recent study from Savvis, demand for more sophisticated commercial data center facilities could soon become much more important. The study found a significant increase in the number of IT professionals who are interested in outsourcing operations to a third-party provider.
In 2010, Savvis performed a similar study that asks IT leaders whether they considered running internal IT systems a waste of corporate resources in light of the opportunities offered by hosting services. Approximately 38 percent of respondents considered many internal systems wasteful at the time. When the same poll was made in 2012, Savvis found that almost 60 percent of survey participants now consider internal IT systems as wasteful.
Bill Fathers, president of Savvis, explained that there has been a cultural change in many IT departments as third-party services have gained popularity.
"This study reveals a significant shift in the way organizations analyze and approach IT services," said Fathers. "IT departments are now looking to strengthen collaboration, efficiency and competitive agility ñ and they're turning to secure, outsourced environments and cloud computing to help meet their objectives."
Fathers also explained that the shift toward third-party services come as businesses, particularly IT departments, become more aware of the need to not only reduce the amount of money spent on technology, but also enable companies to spend more time focused on their core competencies.
As commercial data center operators address the new demand created by the move toward outsourcing, many face a growing need to implement advanced monitoring and management tools. It is especially important that they consolidate data from mobile, cloud-based and other sources throughout the data center. BPM software can help connect this data in a meaningful way and sift through the information that pertains to repeatable tasks, allowing data center managers to focus on the information that really matters.
