Traditional data centers have always viewed their security, efficiency and availability with paramount importance. This is evidenced by physical security and perimeter defense measures that have been put in place. However, IDC believes that a set of new challenges will emerge for the data center managers as more established data centers in Asia/Pacific including Japan (APJ) take incremental steps to migrate to the next-generation platform which is characterized more so by service-oriented applications running over a virtualized infrastructure. These managers will have to comply with the required performance metrics and security posture that are also part of users' top priorities for improved management and automation to improve efficiency, availability and reliability.

“IDC has identified virtualization as one of the key technologies underpinning the successful evolution of existing data centers to the next-generation platform. Server virtualization is already gaining traction rapidly in Asia/Pacific, and the same trend is seen in the storage infrastructure space, albeit at a slower pace. Resources will be pooled to hold down operational costs and to provide a more flexible and agile environment that will facilitate rapid application deployment,” said Willie Low, Senior Market Analyst of IDC's Asia/Pacific Infrastructure Software research.

Results from IDC’s Asia/Pacific “Continuum” End User Survey 2007 shows that three of the top four management features or tools used in virtualized servers by data center managers in Asia/Pacific are directly connected to business continuity and disaster recovery issues. These features or tools are security, maintenance and health monitoring, and systems recovery and backup/disaster recovery.

"The results clearly show that users have come to expect a suite of security and performance management tools to be available as they adopt virtualization technology for their data centers. It is therefore pertinent that business continuity, disaster recovery and security management are built into the equation right at the very beginning when adopting virtualization, especially as enterprises embark on their plans to upgrade to a next generation platform for their data centers," added Willie.

From a process and people perspective, virtualization technology may also render many security and data protection policies ambiguous. This is due to the fact that these policies were designed for the current generation of data centers where virtualization technology is not common. These ambiguities will have implications on the data privacy, compliance and regulatory requirements. More insights about security and virtualization for next generation data centers will be discussed at IDC’s upcoming Asia/Pacific InfraVision Conference 2007.