What Data Center Professionals Must Prioritize in 2013 – Gartner Study

In a press release by the Gartner Data Center 2012 Co-chairs Milind Govekar and Andrew Butler, they noted that mobile, big data, social, and cloud computing technology trends are keeping infrastructure and operations professionals up on their toes. Along with pressures to optimize costs, increase revenues, and deliver savings, data center professionals must be able to prioritize a lot of things for the coming year.

First, the datacenter professionals must be able to cope with big data. Gartner has estimated the big data market to be worth $34 billion by next year, up by 21% from the 2012 data of $20 billion. It is expected that huge money will be used on big data cases. It is also expected that by 2016 the big data market will be at $55 billion and will continue to grow up to 2018. Infrastructure and operations professionals must be able to tap Hadoop or MapReduce in order to successfully harness the benefits of big data. They must be able to plan for data center chances to accommodate big data. They must also have the capability to choose and use emerging storage technologies in order to cope with increasing data velocity and volume.

Second, they must be able to grow the service desk in order to deal with the demands of IT service management, social networking, and mobility. The datacenter professionals must be able to make the necessary investments in management tools specifically for mobile devices. Though there may be huge initial costs, a lot of money will be saved on support costs. These professionals must be able to understand how to use both social and mobile technologies on their favor and not see them as additional burden.

Third, the infrastructure and operations professionals must be able to deploy and manage hybrid clouds. Gartner is predicting that a lot of current private clouds will somehow evolve to become hybrid clouds. These datacenter professionals must be able to provide assurance that private clouds can be extended to become hybrid clouds in the future. Therefore, selecting technologies and vendors are important because any wrong choice can prove to be disastrous in the future.

Lastly, datacenter professionals must be able to align risk management and business continuity with business agility and strategic goals. Thus, public cloud infrastructures must be evaluated carefully. Proper implementation is also important in order to mitigate any failure. There is a growing demand for infrastructure-as-a-service because when compared with platform-as-a-service the former is more portable and flexible. Each organization must be able to choose the right platform to meet its requirements. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the limitations and benefits of each cloud offering is essential to make the right decision.

The Gartner Data Center Summit was held from December 3 – 6, 2012 in Las Vegas, NV. Other matters discussed by Gartner analysts include operations management, fabric computing, and the Windows Server 2012.