Survey Reports Businesses Struggling to Cope with Servers Demands

Businesses are struggling to cope with the demands of managing their own servers. A recent survey by Rackspace Hosting revealed that more than half of the businesses surveyed would “love to never have to buy another server again.”

 

The study was conducted by LoudHouse on behalf of Rackspace. It investigated the views of more than 441 U.S. and U.K.-based IT managers at mid-size enterprises. The study found out  that approximately one third of IT staff’s time is spent on server management.

 

Among the respondents, 58 percent cited the hassle of managing servers as a challenge for their organization, while 61 percent of IT managers said time to drive innovation was a challenge.

 

Lanham Napier, president and CEO of Rackspace Hosting, said that the survey has revealed that a large amount of time and resources is spent on keeping the lights on and preventing problems. Rackspace can free organizations from the hassle of server management and enable their IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives that will positively impact the business.

 

The research underscores Rackspace’s recent launch of No More Servers, a campaign and community dedicated to a new way of buying IT. Rackspace delivers fully-managed computing-as-a-service which includes managed hosting, cloud computing or email hosting. This in turn enables IT teams to instantaneously turn on the computing resources that are needed and turn off resources that are not needed.

 

During the survey, IT teams reported spending 60 percent of their time troubleshooting and managing servers, while only 27 percent of time is spent on strategic and value-add activities.

 

In addition, 51 percent of respondents have made mistakes in their server capacity planning. In fact, 15 percent have bought too many servers and 36 percent have failed to buy enough.

 

This results in businesses being exposed to the risks of financial waste as well as the inability to cope with user demand by not getting server spending right the first time. The survey also found out that 35 percent of companies identify themselves as proactive and slightly ahead of the curve in their approach to new technologies, while 28 percent remain cautious and reactive.