Enterprises in APAC must simplify IT management: CA study

Mumbai

February 21st, 2008

CA has announced the findings of its global study that surveyed 300 CIOs and
top IT executives from the US, EMEA and APAC regions on virtualization
management. The study found there is a gap between the importance of
virtualization and the confidence IT organizations have on whether they can
manage it effectively.

With one-third of the overall respondents coming from enterprises in APAC, it
was interesting to note that 48 percent of the respondents in the region rate
management of their virtual server environment as a critical or high IT
priority, yet only 42 percent think their companies are doing an effective job
in this important area.

Gavin Selkirk, Senior VP and GM for the Asia Pacific and Japan Region, CA,
said, "As Asian companies are fast expanding their businesses in the region
and beyond, they are often faced with complexity issues within their IT
environments and often miss out on what IT can do for their business."

"Successful management of virtualization infrastructure is essential for
optimizing technology initiatives, enabling documented returns on investments
and enhancing productivity across the enterprise," he added.

According to the study, the most significant of challenges that enterprises
in APAC face when managing server virtualization environments are security,
system reliability issues, optimizing system u and managing diverse
infrastructure.

The study has shown a significant need for enterprises in the Asia Pacific
region to realize real business values by unifying and simplifying their IT
management," said Selkirk. "In order for CIOs and IT executives in the
region to increase their confidence in managing virtual server environments,
reduce complexity, improve operational efficiency, and optimize IT investments,
it is important for them to unify disparate elements of IT operations - systems,
processes and people. By using technology and automation to simplify the complex
management of IT, it will help evolve IT operations from being reactive and
focused only on technology to being flexible, adaptable and focused on serving
the business," he added.

The survey also reveals that over the next 18 months the percentage of
respondents worldwide using virtualization in production to support non-mission
critical and mission-critical applications, as well as the percentage using
virtualization to support business continuity/disaster recovery is expected to
increase.

The overall study reveals that servers, storage and applications are the most
important areas to virtualize. In APAC, data centre virtualization and
virtualization of application grids are almost equally as important as servers
and storage. When managing a server virtualization environment,
performance/utilization, security and automation are the most important key
capabilities.

The study also revealed the top benefits experienced as a result of server
virtualization initiatives are enhance or enable business continuity/disaster
recovery efforts, optimizing system performance, more flexible development and
testing environments, easier hardware provisioning and software deployment, and
merge/unify management of heterogeneous systems. Top benefits experienced as a
result of server virtualization initiatives are easier hardware provisioning and
software deployment, more flexible development and testing environments, and
optimizing system performance.