Just over 70% of CEOs see technological change as the most critical external factor that could impact on their organisations over the next three to five years, while 72% of chief marketing officers see cost as a barrier to using technology, said technology giant IBM integrated technology services executive for South Africa Mariana Kruger.

“We are in a new era of efficiency and we need to address business needs [in an ever-changing information technology (IT) environment],” she said, adding that only one in five clients had efficient data centres.

Business needed to start examining the long-term operating costs of a data centre, which could reach up to five times higher than the initial outlay, as opposed to capital expenses and output.

Power and cooling features were increasingly more important than space requirements on the back of rising electricity costs. IBM believed that over the life of the data centre, electricity costs could account for up to 75% of the operating costs.

Further, many companies, when initially building a data centre, scaled it to the growth anticipated over the 10- to 20-year life of the data centre and, in many instances, end up overspecifying and hosting a data centre too big for its current needs, said Kruger.

Companies could use their servers and storage – which in many cases were larger than required – more effectively, generating a higher return on investment and reducing the pressure on their centres.

She said IBM, which had produced thousands of data centres around the globe, believed that ensuring the “right size” data centre, using scalable capacity ability, with less complexity and increased flexibility and optimisation, would aid efficiencies and costs.

Portable, modular centres were becoming increasingly popular as they could be installed at 15% to 20% less cost, and add 20% more efficiency.

Kruger commented that the use of a modular, portable data centre enabled a scalable “pay-as-you-grow” approach, wherein a company added capacity as required.

The quick deployment of the data centre enabled almost immediate support, while a company awaited the up-to-24-month construction of a permanent data centre.

Companies were also using the modular data centre for operations in remote regions, for temporary use or just as added capacity outside their building.

IBM’s high-density portable modular data centre aimed to meet these needs and, to date, the company had deployed over 1 000 portable data centres in 24 countries.

The flexible, secure, fully customisable, cloud-enabled containerised data centre could be erected in 12 to 14 weeks and encompassed the full functionality of a traditional permanent data centre.