The flood waters are swirling and rising all around you. You can’t run away. It’s dragging you down. You wake up in a cold sweat . . .

Relax, it’s just a recurring nightmare, brought on by Big Data, the bane of data center management professionals everywhere these days. You have to manage more data than ever before. And it’s coming at you from more directions. According to the 2012 State of the DataCenter Report, enormous data growth and complexity are causing “growing pains.”

To say the least. No wonder you have nightmares about data center management.

The report cited six reasons for increasing data complexity, prioritized as:

• An increasing number of business-critical applications.
• More data being generated.
• More widespread use of mobile computing.
• Server virtualization.
• Lack of sufficient budgets.
• Increased use of the public cloud.

Data complexity is costly.

The report notes that, on average, organizations experienced 16 data center outages in the preceding year, racking up a total cost of $5.1 million – that’s per company -- due primarily to system failures, but also to human error and, occasionally, natural disasters.

Companies are responding by revisiting data center management opportunities. Key goals include strengthened security, the ability to find information faster, lower information storage and management costs, mitigation of compliance and legal risks. Companies are taking a renewed look at the cloud. In short, the report noted complexity counter-measures are focusing on:

• Increased training.
• Standardization.
• Centralization.
• Virtualization.

And increasing budgets. Yes, even though top executives cite cost reduction as a critical, overarching need, they also know they have to be proactive in dealing with data growth or face business-threatening consequences. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said that spending more to address data growth was important.

90% are gearing up to improve information governance.

Effective data center management requires a comprehensive plan of action, now more than ever before. Nine percent of survey respondents said they’ve already developed and implemented an information governance strategy, and another 81% indicated they’re working toward that goal.

A well-considered governance strategy can keep you from being overwhelmed with data and help you keep it organized and readily available. That’s crucial, because as survey respondents noted, increasing data and complexity are causing delays in finding and retrieving information, more lost or misplaced data, compliance failures, inability to meet SLAs, security breaches, and other breakdowns. All accompanied by increased costs.  

There’s no doubt that increasing data complexity is making data center management much more complex, too. In addition to a greater volume of information from more sources, new technologies that can help alleviate problems often don’t interface with existing legacy systems or applications.  

Complexity is affecting data center management for all sizes of companies, regardless of their industry or where they’re located around the world. Greatest concerns center around security and infrastructure, along with disaster recovery and storage-related issues. Complexity is compromising agility, threatening your organization’s ability to keep up and move forward.

Without an information governance strategy, your enterprise is at much greater risk. You’re not only losing your ability to maintain current performance levels, you’re wasting precious time creating unwieldy work-arounds that don’t support leading-edge functionality.

To head boldly into the future and capitalize on new opportunities, your company must be prepared to handle increased complexity smoothly. The alternative is to slip under the nightmare flood waters, perhaps losing out permanently to your competition.

How is your data center management changing?

Photo via MShades on Flickr