For the past seven years, I’ve conducted Uptime Institute’s Annual Data Center Industry Survey (over 1,000 end user respondents from around the globe, conducted by email).

Every year, some trend jumps out as the main theme. Maybe it’s because I’m turning 40 this year, but my takeaway from 2017 is that enterprise data center professionals need to relax—and reevaluate what’s important to their organizations.

Over the course of the survey, I’ve watched our respondents wrestle with uncertainties as the IT profession continues to evolve. But the data from this year’s survey illustrates that many of the industry’s concerns are not coming to pass, meanwhile chronic management problems go untended.

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The purpose of dramatic tragedy is to teach us to avoid misfortune by showing a negative example.

With that in mind, I introduce our tragic hero. Let’s call him Jim.

Jim is a vice president of data center operations for a bank. He’s been tasked with finding a replacement for the company’s legacy data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool set, which ran into a dead end for support and updates.

Jim manages a half-dozen data centers of various ages and design. The motley portfolio is the product of acquisitions and shifting management strategies over the past decade. Some of the sites are underutilized, others are coming up against capacity constraints, while still others are running on borrowed time and would likely require significant updates if anybody dared to evaluate them.

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For enterprise IT organizations embarking on a data center capital project, the stakes are undeniably high. Building a new data center is a massive investment, but it also enables or hampers an organization’s IT strategy and capability—affecting an organization’s business performance for years to come.

As more organizations rely on colocation data center providers, ensuring the design and construction of these projects meet your business requirements is critical as well.

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With multiple vendors, subcontractors and typically more than 50 different disciplines involved in any data center project—structural, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, fuel pumps, networking and more—it would be remarkable if there were no errors introduced or corners cut during the construction process.

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The percentage of IT processed at in-house sites has remained steady at around 70 percent, but data points to a major shift to co-location and cloud for new workloads in the coming years.

Half of senior IT execs expect the majority of their IT workloads to reside off-premise in the future, according to Uptime Institute’s sixth annual Data Center Industry Survey. Of those, 70 percent expect that shift to happen by 2020.

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It is hard to predict what percentage will go to public cloud, but a significant portion of those workloads will be shifting to co-location providers—companies that provide data center facilities and varying levels of operations management and support. 

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