Uptime Institute has announced the findings of its seventh annual Data Center Industry Survey, which examines the key trends and developments shaping today’s IT infrastructure industry. The results reveal that while the majority of IT organizations are moving some of their workloads to the cloud, the percentage of workloads residing in enterprise-owned/operated data centers has remained stable at 65% since 2014. The takeaway is that with the explosive growth in business critical applications and data, enterprises continue to see the data center as not just important, but essential to their digital-centric strategies.

“The survey findings reflect several key trends that are acting together as a powerful catalyst for change within the industry. Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualization, and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just 5 years ago,” said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. “Through this change, enterprise-owned data centers have remained a central component. We urge data center and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it.”

• Data center budgets strong in 2017. Compared to 2016, nearly 75% of companies’ data center budgets have increased or stayed consistent this year.
• Enterprise-owned and colocation data centers still primary compute venue. On average, respondents report that nearly two-thirds of their IT assets are currently deployed in their own data centers, with 22% deployed in colocation or multi-tenant data center providers, and 13% deployed in the cloud.
• IT resilience is growing, complementing redundancy. The majority of companies (68%) rely on IT-based resiliency. Using an IT architecture with multiple, geographically distributed data centers, they rely on live application failover in the event of an outage. At the same time, 73% of respondents said they are not deploying lower redundancy physical data center sites despite increased adoption of IT-based resilience.
• Downtime matters. More than 90% of data center and IT professionals believe their corporate management is more concerned about outages now than they were just a year ago
• Metrics and business. While 90% of organizations conduct root cause analysis of any IT outage, only 60% report that they measure the cost of downtime as a business metric.

Uptime Institute will be holding a webinar on Tuesday, May 2 to deliver in-depth analysis and commentary on key findings from this year’s survey. Topics will include the impact cloud computing has on capacity planning, major challenges facing IT infrastructure organizations today, the adoption rates for new technologies, and more.