IDC Study: Automation and Analytics Bring Innovation to the Data Center

However, anyone who bases their strategy on buzzwords is unlikely to get the most out of their company. Rather, it is a matter of intelligently introducing current technology.

An IDC study has revealed some interesting insights: 57 percent of respondents are currently modernizing their IT technology; 32 percent of companies are investing in data centers to increase business productivity; and 80 percent of respondents are using clouds. IDC surveyed IT and business decision-makers from 210 organizations with more than 500 employees in Germany in February of this year.

For 32 percent, an important driver for investments in the data center is the increase in productivity. Companies have therefore clearly recognized that IT has enormous potential to improve all business processes. For 23 percent of companies, the consolidation of IT in the data center is the focus of activities.

IT consolidation has swept through IT organizations in several waves in recent years. Its benefits include better utilization of resources, simple management of systems and functional unbundling of evolved structures. At the same time, it leads to higher security and compliance as well as cost reductions. Both aspects are the main motivation for investments for 15 percent each.

"The innovation momentum of digitization is based on the intelligent combination of an agile data center 'on-premises' with cloud-based solutions and resources"

Matthias Eckermann, Director Product Management Suse Linux Enterprise, is convinced.

"Traditional data centers, which have often been in operation for 40 years, can no longer achieve this on their own. First of all, the decision to change must come from the very top of the company and be consistently implemented there.

New business models are mapped by IT. It is advisable to start with small steps and embed them in the larger context of the digital master plan from the outset."

Software Defined Solution

The first steps could be: setting up a software-defined storage solution, for example to collect and analyze sensor data from machines, or integrating container solutions that offer new possibilities for software and process development and for adapting IT-supported processes, or setting up a private cloud so that the development department, for example, can set up test environments quickly and automatically.

"The art in all this is to connect old and new structures of the heterogeneous IT landscape. This is where innovative open source solutions can build bridges and enable change step by step."

Eckermann explains in the interview.

Strategy and architecture

Modernization activities are based on a clear strategy. Even partial steps must always be embedded in the IT strategy and architecture model. 49 percent of respondents are optimizing their IT architecture.

The architecture model also provides the framework for orchestrating and automating IT services across different systems and domains, and how and to what extent external IT and business services are used.

Many companies see comprehensive automation of data center operations and the integration and orchestration of internal and external IT resources and business services as a promising approach.

"Exactly, this is the appropriate strategy"

confirms Gerald Hofmann, Vice President Central EMEA at Veeam Software.

"On the one hand, the market is increasingly offering suitable technologies for this purpose, and on the other hand, companies can use it to alleviate the need or shortage of skilled workers. Medium-sized and small companies in particular are struggling with this. It's important to keep development paths open in the process."

AI & Machine Learning

There are more and more infrastructure solutions that use machine learning.

"This offers potential, especially in data management"

knows Gerald Hofmann.

"Not to forget the cloud. Sometimes it makes economic sense to buy ready-made services from hyperscalers, but in strategically important areas it is more advisable to work individually with the service provider you trust or to use an in-house solution."

Analytics and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) provide information about the behavior of the IT infrastructure and are able to predict the failure of individual components of the IT infrastructure based on the analysis of processes. 51 percent of respondents already use analytics in IT operations.

This result is surprising and was not to be expected. More and more IT security solutions are also relying on machine learning to detect anomalies and trigger defensive or quarantine measures.

Automation

41 percent of respondents are currently focusing specifically on optimizing various automation tasks.

"Most IT organizations in Germany have recognized the signs of the times "

says Matthias Zacher, Senior Consulting Manager at IDC and project leader of the study.

"However, there is still room for improvement. This is especially true for automation in the data center and the use of analytics and artificial intelligence in operational IT."

Volker Ludwig, Senior Vice President Sales, e-shelter:

"Automation is the central building block for the efficient operation of any IT environment. Uninterrupted operation and the confidentiality, availability and integrity of data are mission-critical in all organizations today.

However, automation and integration are not worthwhile for all processes. Especially for resources that are not needed very often or for legacy systems, it is important to check the actual workload in advance."

Data Center in the Cloud

The most dominant trend in the data center is cloud computing in its various forms. 90 percent of the companies surveyed have a cloud strategy. This study once again shows that cloud computing is well established in Germany.

A discussion about the "whether" of cloud has thus become superfluous. Companies are often interested in one-stop shopping, but in reality this is difficult to achieve. For this reason, the number of those using more than one cloud platform will grow over the next 24 months.

Multi & Hybrid Cloud

59 percent will rely on two or three platforms in the medium term. This also clearly points the way to the multi-cloud. Workloads are increasingly running in the cloud. Currently, the private cloud still dominates, either in the company's own data center or in the provider data center.

Investments flow most frequently into data-related topics such as analytics and relational database management (63 percent), artificial intelligence/machine learning (63 percent) and business intelligence/data warehousing (61 percent).

Software Defined Infrastructure is the basis for the developments described. The expansion of virtualized infrastructures (software defined compute, software defined storage, software defined networking) to include automation and orchestration components creates the technical basis for implementing private clouds and public clouds and combining them in hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios.

Standardization

"For successful provisioning of IT resources across all departments, the topic of standardization plays a particularly important role," explains Donald Badoux, Managing Director at Equinix, in an interview. "Standardized services and processes enable a short provisioning time and reliable quality within the IT structures of the own company.

At the same time, agile development methods - such as Scrum or DevOps - help to introduce IT solutions promptly and in line with demand. The third success factor that companies should consider is the evaluation of hybrid multi-cloud services.

Hybrid multi-cloud services, for example, allow companies to use applications on the cloud structures of different providers in parallel and thus implement the optimal solution for them quickly and flexibly."

The comprehensive view of the data center necessarily includes DevOps, which provides an answer to the key question asked by IT managers: How can application deployment be accelerated and the requirements of the business departments better met? It is therefore all the more surprising that only 31 percent of the companies stated that they use DevOps.

Conclusion

The IDC study shows that companies in Germany have started to modernize their data centers and IT infrastructure. The investments of recent years are paying off, so that more and more IT organizations have a modernized infrastructure. However, numerous "construction sites" remain.

Business success and modern IT are mutually dependent. The results show that the journey will increasingly move in the direction of the cloud. The range of deployment scenarios is extremely wide and includes all IT resources and increasingly also the business services of a company.

The complexity in the data center will remain. The demands on management and governance will increase rather than decrease. But this complexity can be managed.

Here, too, orchestration and automation are the key approaches. Organizations should therefore comprehensively optimize their technology, architecture and processes today rather than tomorrow.