79% of organizations report increasing complexity in the data center, according to the results of Symantec's 2012 State of the Data Center Survey.

Here are some highlights of the survey results:

- Organizations of all sizes, industries and regions report increasing complexity within the data center.

- Data center complexity impacts all areas of computing, most notably security and infrastructure, as well as disaster recovery, storage and compliance.

- Several factors are driving data center complexity. First, respondents reported they are dealing with an increasing number of applications that they consider to be business-critical. 65% said the number of business-critical applications is increasing or increasing greatly. Other key drivers of data center complexity include the growth of strategic IT trends such as mobile computing (44%), server virtualization (43%) and public cloud (41%).

- The survey revealed that the effects of growing data center complexity are far reaching. The most commonly mentioned impact is higher costs, with nearly half of the organizations citing it as an effect of complexity. Other impacts include reduced agility (39%), longer lead times for storage migration (39%) and provisioning storage (38%), security breaches (35%), and downtime (35%).

- The typical organization experienced an average of 16 data center outages in the past 12 months, at a total cost of $5.1 million. The most common cause was systems failures, followed by human error, and natural disasters.

- Organizations are implementing several measures to reduce complexity, including training, standardization, centralization, virtualization, and increased budgets. In fact, 63 percent of respondents consider increasing their budget to be somewhat or extremely important to dealing with data center complexity.

- The single biggest initiative organizations are undertaking is to implement a comprehensive information governance strategy, defined as a formal program that allows organizations to proactively classify, retain and discover information in order to reduce information risk, reduce the cost of managing information, establish retention policies and streamline their eDiscovery process. 90% of organizations are either discussing information governance, or have implemented trials or actual programs.

The following are Symantec's recommendations that IT can try to mitigate the effects of data center complexity:

1. Bring Issues Up to the C-level

Establish C-level ownership of information governance. Start with high-ROI projects like data loss prevention, archiving and eDiscovery to preserve critical information, find what you need and delete the rest.

2. Get visibility beyond platforms

Understand the business services that IT is providing and all of the dependencies to reduce downtime and miscommunications.

3. Understand your IT assets

Understand what IT assets you have, how they are being consumed, and by whom. This will help cut costs and risk. The organization won't buy servers and storage it doesn't need, teams can be held accountable for what they use, and the company can be sure it isn’t running out of capacity.

4. Reduce costs

Reduce the number of backup applications to meet recovery SLAs and reduce capital expenses, operating expenses and training costs.

5. Deploy deduplication

Deploy deduplication everywhere to help address the information explosion and reduce the rising costs associated with backing up data.

6. Simplify backup and recovery

Use appliances to simplify backup and recovery operations across physical and virtual machines.

Symantec’s 2012 State of the Data Center Survey was conducted by ReRez Research in March 2012. The results are based on responses from 2,453 IT professionals at organizations in 34 countries. Respondents included senior IT staff focused on operations and tactical functions, as well as staff members focused on planning and IT management.