He was speaking at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium (IIIS) event in Singapore. Attended by about 150 storage technology decision makers, managers and specialists on 29 June at the Raffles City Convention Centre, the event was jointly organised by Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and Computerworld Singapore.

"Today, the bulk of IT budget consumed by maintaining huge storage & processing facilities, software licensing costs, versioning and migration of apps," he said. Some 80 percent is being spent on maintaining these costs while only 20 percent is allocated to innovation. The ideal state should be that the IT budget gets split 50-50 on innovation and keeping the lights on.

And in the maintenance of the legacy environment, the complexity of IT management rises when the business continues to grow.

Thirdly, the cost of power in the data centre is going outrun everything in the IT budget, said Chellam, even more than "what you are going to spend on hiring talent". And the Singapore government has recognised the high power consumption levels in the data centres, and is looking at ways to build green data centres that consume less power, he added.

The issue of power also became a critical concern for Japanese telco Softbank following the earthquake and tsunami disasters in March 2011.