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Based on discussions with HP customers and consultants who have worked with leading global
organizations, we have identified three critical business metrics for data centers—reducing costs,
managing risks, and accelerating business growth. These metrics reflect a long-term trend, a shift from
“information technology”—which implies IT is separated from the business—to a model where
technology powers the business. The role of IT management is changing from being measured in
terms of delivering technology infrastructure, to being measured on the overall business outcomes
derived from this infrastructure. So, what’s keeping data center managers up at night?
The challenge: Demand for storage and compute capacity is rapidly increasing as processes become
digital and businesses perform more and more critical transactions and activities online. Meeting this
demand has led IT departments to quickly build and expand data centers and integrate new
technologies ahead of schedule. This added complexity has resulted in rising infrastructure and
management costs. Power and cooling costs have also sharply increased as data centers add new
energy-hungry equipment, asset utilization has become less efficient, and energy costs have risen.
The goal: More cost-effective data centers can improve your business’ bottom line. For example, on
average, data center costs represent about 5% of the average IT budget. This figure includes
buildings, facility management and support, power and cooling equipment costs, and electricity; it
does not include IT infrastructure-related costs such as networks, servers, and storage. Moreover, new
data centers easily cost $100M USD to build, with some even reaching half a billion USD. These are
investments that can not be absorbed by the typical IT budget and often need board-level approval.
The U.S. Department of Commerce (Bureau of Economy Analysis) reports that half of all capital
expenditures are IT related. Defining strategies to manage—and minimize—these costs can
significantly boost profitability. Hence, enterprises should consider sourcing strategies for facilities
and staff, consolidation, automation of data center operations, virtualization, and modernization of IT
infrastructure and facilities to achieve higher asset utilization at lower operating costs (power,
cooling, administration, floor space). Applying these transformation techniques has proven to save up
to 35% while providing more processing power and storage capacity.
Managing risks in a 24x7 connected environment
The challenge: Historically, IT supported internal business processes, but today it also supports
external processes, including enterprise Web sites, as well as business-to-consumer, business-tobusiness,
and even customer-to-customer processes. All this means that failures in the data center can
now seriously impact customer satisfaction and company reputation. Another challenge is caused by
the need for more business integration, which in turn has been a driver for stronger application and
infrastructure integration and has led to the adoption of modular, service-oriented architectures (SOA)
to simplify development, integration, and reuse of “core” enterprise services. As a side effect of this
evolution, it is not uncommon to have unexpected or large application dependencies. Hence,
businesses expect IT to understand the consequences and be a partner in increasing customer
satisfaction and loyalty by providing reliable service and determining the right business continuity
strategy for those strongly integrated business processes or applications. The Data Center Institute
recognizes these challenges and predicts that within the next five years, one out of every four data
centers will experience a business disruption serious enough to affect the entire company’s ability to
continue business-as-usual.
The goal: A more secure and reliable data center can dramatically improve availability and minimize
interruptions to critical business processes. The objective is to evolve from a model where security,
availability, and business continuity are architected for every application or business process to a
model in which the data center is considered as a whole. This approach, along with an adaptive
sourcing strategy, can improve business continuity coverage as well as customer and employee
satisfaction, and it can also reduce cost.
Supporting business growth
The challenge: Today, about 95% of business processes rely on IT services. It’s no surprise, then, that
better IT services generally lead to better business results. For example, recent studies by the Harvard
Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management have shown that market share increases were
greatest in industries that used IT most extensively.
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