Energy efficiency, decent budgets and strong teams crucial for data centre projects

Reducing costs, improving energy efficiency and relocating data centers were all cited as top priorities by IT professionals for 2020, according to a new poll from Secure I.T. Environments.

According to the poll, reducing energy costs was the top priority for 46% of respondents, and improving energy efficiency was top for 39%. Furthermore, one third (29%) stated they will be looking to relocate their data centers in 2020.

The top challenges, as cited by the respondents, were around upgrading, compliance, budgeting and skills.

Half (49%) cited upgrading their existing data centers as the biggest challenge, followed by the continued pressure around regulatory compliance (37%), either in terms of their specific industry, or areas of general compliance related to the IT department such as GDPR, ISO27001, IASME Governance or NIST.

As for budgeting and skills, 34% reported that they see recruiting skilled professionals to work in their IT departments as a key challenge for the coming years.

Furthermore, 37% reported they had adequate budgets for projects, while 27% said faced challenges in receiving enough finds, and 20% stated they are always underfunded. 15% felt they had the budget that allowed them to do everything they needed.

The poll highlighted that organisations are not only looking to upgrade their data centers but invest in new technologies to support their businesses across 2020 and 2021.

This was largely focused on improving data center connectivity to benefit cloud services and high performance computing, both cited as most important by 27%, followed by incorporating 5G technology and artificial intelligence at 24%.

Edge data centers also featured heavily with a fifth (22%) planning to implement these to improve the performance and flexibility of their infrastructure.

Finally, the poll considered the pressure IT professionals face and the emotional response employees felt towards their work.

When asked to consider the current state of their IT infrastructure, half (51%) reported negative emotions: worry (27%), anxiety (22%) and despair (2%). However, the most reported emotion was pride at 32%.

Secure I.T. Environments director Chris Wellfair says, "The data center is becoming more important to organisations than ever before, as they look at new ways to grow and support staff.

"However, finding the skilled staff to deliver these transformative projects remains a challenge, even though organisations can secure the budgets needed to upgrade.

"Having the key personnel and external partners is critical to the long-term success of any data center project, so the time required to assemble that team needs to be factored into any transformation project.

Wellfair says, "It's set to be an exciting couple of years as data centers are accommodated with new technology to serve their businesses.

Secure I.T. Environments is a UK company specialising in the design and build of energy efficient internal and external secure modular data centers, containerised data centers and infrastructure.