Software-Defined Data Center Gains Ground in 2016

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This year, the software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies are likely to figure into the IT strategies of most enterprises, according to a new survey from HyTrust, a virtualization and cloud management and security specialist.

HyTrust quizzed 500 executives and IT professionals in the U.S. and U.K., from CEOs and CIOs to IT administrators and network engineers, for its 2016 State of the Cloud and SDDC Study. Among the C-suite, 66 percent said they expected to increase their adoption of SDDC solutions in 2016.

Enterprises appear to be growing more adept at incorporating SDDC solutions into their IT environments.

Sixty-two percent of C-level executives said they anticipate faster deployment of SDDC technologies this year. Nearly half (49 percent) expect greater tangible benefits and a return-on-investment (ROI), indicating that SDDC’s cost-cutting and agility-boosting perks are starting to make financial sense for a large number of data center operators.

Across the entire IT org chart, 62 percent said expected faster SDDC adoption and 65 percent predicted faster deployment in 2016. Half said they plan on tapping the public cloud for more of their IT needs and 38 percent said their workloads would span across hybrid cloud infrastructures. Fifty-three percent said they plan to increase their usage of storage virtualization products and 49 percent expect network virtualization to help transform their IT organizations.

Security concerns are also waning, HyTrust found.

Seventy percent of those polled said security is less of an obstacle to SDDC adoption this year. Nonetheless, many IT pros remain wary. Over half (54 percent) of respondents said they foresee more breaches while 11 percent expected fewer. A quarter of the survey takers said SDDC deployments would lead to more breaches.

The potential for breaches and increased security risks (68 percent) are likeliest to slam the brakes on SDDC migrations, followed by the specter of operational inefficiencies (59 percent), compliance and audit failures (58 percent) and lack of proper automation and orchestration. Data center outages were a worry for over half (56 percent) of respondents.

Taken altogether, 2016 will be a watershed year for SDDC vendors.

“In a way, it is like a perfect storm where a number of different factors come together to help drive a larger trend,” wrote Jason Lackey, director of Digital and Marketing Operations at HyTrust, in a blog post. “In this case it is looking like 2016 will be the year of the Software Defined Data Center as increased adoption is driven by faster deployment, better ROI and better ways of addressing real and perceived security concerns.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.