IT Priorities 2018: Datacentre infrastructure investments show no signs of slowing

Talking cloud trends

With datacentres often described as one of the largest line items on any enterprise budget sheet, finding ways to cut the costs associated with running them in this way is sure to be of interest.

This work can often form part of a wider push by an organisation to embrace the public cloud to meet their storage and compute requirements, and wind down their use of on-premise technologies.

According to 451 Research’s recent Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse survey, which featured a similar number of respondents to the Tech Target poll, 60% of the 1,000 IT professionals who participated said they expected the bulk of their on-premise IT requirements to be met by public cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments by 2019.

For lots of enterprises, though, the prospect of going all-in on the cloud is not an option they can entertain at the moment, as there are some workloads – for regulatory or cost reasons, for example – that need to remain on-premise.

Therefore, enterprises may seize on this opportunity to re-evaluate their datacentre setup, to ensure the on-premise infrastructure that remains in place is efficient, cost-effective and high-performing.

A highlight on hybrid IT

In the 2017 IT Priorities report, readying their datacentre infrastructure for the emergence of hybrid cloud deployments was voted as the top investment priority for UK and European IT decision-makers.

This may also explain why so many enterprises are prioritising investing in their datacentre estate this year, as part of their ongoing push to connect their on-premise resources to the public cloud.

In the UK drill-down of the results, the adoption of the hybrid IT model was flagged as a growing area of importance for IT decision-makers, with 52% more (compared with last year) flagging this as an area of utmost investment interest during 2018.

The same, however, cannot be said for Emea as a whole, with the data revealing a 10% drop in interest from IT decision-makers across the region in adopting the hybrid IT approach.

This finding was also mirrored elsewhere in the report, when Emea-based IT decision-makers were asked to indicate their preferred IT deployment model for the year ahead, which revealed a 12% drop in the number prioritising the use of hybrid cloud.

The number of respondents who expressed a preference for the public cloud deployment model – infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – remained the same year-over-year, but, interestingly, a 27% rise in the number opting for on-premise appliances was also recorded.   

While the results in isolation offer scant insight into what might be behind the Emea-wide downturn in prioritisation for hybrid IT deployments, some of the report’s other data points suggest this trend might be indicative of these projects maturing and growing in sophistication.

For example, container management emerged as an area of intense deployment interest for participants in the both the Emea and UK surveys in 2018 compared to last year, with year-on-year growth figures reported in the region of 118%.

Many enterprises are looking to use containers to manage and boost the portability of their applications, so they can run on-premise, in the public cloud or within a hybrid setup.

Therefore, the growing interest of IT decision-makers in using container management tools suggests – in some cases – maybe some have already moved beyond simply wanting to build a hybrid cloud and on to how to make the lifecycle management of their cloud-hosted applications even easier.