To meet the evolving needs of customers, IT managers must ask themselves the hard-hitting questions. Here are some tactics to prep for the data center for 2025.
Across the globe, IT departments are realizing that digital transformation is no longer an abstract concept: it’s a reality. Findings from an Emerson Study on the data center of 025Opens a new window reveals that sixty-seven percent of IT managers believe computing will be cloud-based in the year 2025. While IT managers can’t plan entirely for everything the future has to bring, they can start to prepare their data center for new pressures on the horizon.
These fall months are often a strategic time to take stock of your current data center needs and also begin future-proofing data centers. To meet the evolving needs of customers, IT managers must ask themselves the hard-hitting questions. Here are some tactics to prep the big data data center for 2025.
1. It Starts with the Infrastructure
Companies need to balance the right mix of new and traditional IT infrastructure, with an emphasis on freedom and interoperability. Consider a software-defined infrastructure, which IDC defines as “the concept to build and run an open and agile IT infrastructure environment in an automated manner.†Building a data center with open source solutions will assist enterprises with the scalability and reliability needed for digital transformation now – and in the decades to come.
2. Keep Security Under Control
IT departments and security teams must work cohesively. Although the IT talent shortage is contributing to successful cyberattacks, a lack of collaboration throughout the organization is another culprit. For example, the WannaCry and Petya incidents showed a dangerous disconnect between security teams, which detect threats, and IT operations teams, which implement controls to prevent threats — not to mention the growing problem of shadow IT. After all, security teams can’t protect what they don’t know about. Companies should invest the time needed to work with IT security teams to ensure visibility and scalability.
3. Stay Agile
Today, almost 75 percent of all workloads in data centers are virtualized, and this number is only expected to grow in the coming years. In fact, “the biggest challenge IT admins face is that conventional storage is ill-equipped to deal with virtualization because the storage is built for physical workloads.†This is why each company needs to evaluate their unique workload needs on a case-by-case basis.
4. Take Full Rein of Your Data
In an ideal world, enterprise storage systems would be perfectly configured to serve the needs of the businesses now and in the future. However, the amount of data is rapidly increasing, and many enterprises aren’t prepared to manage it. *8Where once we dealt in megabytes of data, we now deal in gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes.** IDC estimates that by the year 2020, worldwide there will be 40 zettabytes (ZB) of data, representing a 5000 percent growth rate from 2010 to 2020.
The rise of connected devices is also bringing an increase of unstructured data, which can create more security and compliance headaches if it isn’t managed properly. To control the explosion, start by understanding what data you have and where it lives. Then determine the best solution to manage the expected growth. Many organizations are utilizing a software-defined data infrastructure, as it allows you to scale and grow with the explosion of data.
5. Evolve your People with the Technology
There’s been a huge surge in the number of network administrator jobs over the past few years. By 2022, the field will have increased by some 42,000 jobs. As more professionals enter the field and more skills are needed, it’s important to ensure you’re regularly training staff and helping them evolve to meet data center needs. For example, companies must provide a familiar console for system administrators, system authentication integration, and guides that enable system administrators to quickly adapt to system operations.