Why Data Centers Still Dominate Tech Deployments

Despite the growing presence of the cloud, the majority of IT assets are still deployed at enterprise-owned data centers, according to the Uptime Institute's seventh annual "Data Center Industry Survey." The findings reveal that flaws within the cloud provider evaluation process may be contributing to this trend. Many organizations are, in fact, still addressing data and application storage demands with new data center construction, rather than with cloud migrations or colocation space investments. Data center outages still come with the territory, but most tech departments are getting to the bottom of downtime by conducting root-cause analyses of incidents, as well as measuring their impact on costs. "Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualization and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago," said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. "Through this change, enterprise-owned data centers have remained a central component. We urge data center and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently, and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it." Additional findings address a range of data center and IT-related topics, such as power generation methods and the under-representation of women in the workforce, and we've included some of those here. More than 1,000 global data center and IT professionals took part in the research.