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2016 may well be the year where the software defined data centre (SDDC) will become a fixture in the US, according to a study released by Intel and HyTrust.

According to the report, which polled the views of more than 500 senior business executives, 65% of respondents – and 66% from the C-suite – expect increased adoption in this area, while 62% of CxO respondents argue there will be faster deployment in 2016, while roughly half expect greater tangible benefits (49%) and more adoption for network virtualisation (48%) respectively.

41% of those polled expect better alignment of security strategies specifically to address the SDDC, while half (50%) see greater use of public cloud and 38% see workloads traversing hybrid clouds and utilising hyper-converged infrastructure respectively.

Yet the outlook is not entirely sunny. 56% of those polled said a data centre outage would either be ‘likely’ or ‘most likely’ with the move to SDDC, while more than two thirds (67%) argue a data breach would be the highest concern. Loss of operational efficiencies (59%), lack of automation and orchestration (58%) and compliance or audit failure (58%) were also seen as likely issues.

Almost three quarters (74%) of the C-suite polled said they expect to see security as less of an obstacle to greater SDDC adoption, but despite this many of those polled do not have any illusions about the dangers of security. The position of the market right now is key and the survey reveals an interesting insight in this regard; 44% of those polled decry the lack of solutions from current vendors and the immaturity of vendor offerings. It is a view echoed by this publication; Michael Allen, CTO and EMEA VP of Dynatrace, told CloudTech that software defined networking (SDN) and the SDDC were at a similar level to where cloud computing was two years ago.