CIOs across Europe have identified IT consolidation as a key near term initiative as they look for ways to maintain or improve performances despite the economic situation.
According to research from Riverbed, 40% of CIOs will look to centralise all servers over the next 12 months and 44% believe application performance over the wide area network (WAN) will be the main challenge to a consolidated IT infrastructure as workers will be demanding fast access to centralised resources.
"Most medium and large-sized organisations have distributed workforces with headquarters, data centres, branch offices and mobile workers scattered across the globe," said Mark Lewis, senior director, marketing and alliances for EMEA at Riverbed.
"Over time, infrastructures were built to support these remote workers; however, enterprises have found this model to be too complicated and costly. As they begin to consolidate their IT infrastructures, fast access to centralised email, file sharing and applications will be imperative so that employee productivity is not compromised," he said.
The research, which will be released in full later today, also says that virtualisation and cloud computing are next on the priorities list for CIOs.
"With cloud-based applications on the rise, traffic across the WAN is only going to increase. And as any network will have limitations in terms of how much data it can carry at any point in time, the increase in availability of resource-heavy cloud-based applications such as Exchange online and SharePoint is only going to heighten concerns," added Lewis.
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Riverbed is mainly associated with the WAN optimisation space so it’s no surprise that the firm is pushing that aspect of the results. However the theme does fit with the need to improve existing infrastructure rather than spend money on new tech.
The results of this survey also echo other announcements; in September 2010 a survey from Brocade revealed that more than three-quarters of enterprises across EMEA are looking to consolidate their existing IT infrastructure in the next 12 months, in a bid to increase network performance, simplify management and enhance business efficiency.
The Riverbed research was carried out by Vanson Bourne and spoke to 300 CIOs across Europe from a variety of industries.
