The amount of digital information that businesses have to manage is set to grow by 30 percent over the next two years. That’s a key finding in the latest edition of the Hitachi Data Systems Storage Index, a bi-annual survey of more than 840 CIOs and IT directors from 21 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Looking at attitudes toward data storage, specifically in relation to reasons for implementation and individual storage technologies such as NAS and virtualization, the latest Storage Index reveals an uncertainty in exact IT spend on storage, set against a minimal increase in IT budgets and an ever-mounting data burden.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents agreed that data will increase over the next two years with 76 percent of that sample citing e-mail as the biggest contributor. Set against this trend is a maximum 10 percent increase in IT budgets over the next two years and, more interestingly, an increase in the lack of awareness from CIOs and IT directors regarding storage spend as a percentage of total IT budget (up by 15 percent from the last Storage Index).
This suggests that storage spend isn’t being diligently tracked or that there is a blurring of the boundaries between “traditional” storage spend on capacity and the emerging technologies that focus on better storage management which may be harder to categorize; a view shared by Michael Vath, Senior VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems, EMEA. “The research validates what Hitachi Data Systems has been hearing from its customers and prospects for a long time; that the data burden is increasing yet budgets are virtually static. Purchasing decisions are being made on how storage can contribute to the overall business rather than simply how much capacity is needed and the market needs to react to this by focusing on business solutions rather than simply shifting boxes.”
When pressed on what they see as their main storage issues, the perennial problems of security, downtime and budgets (31 percent, 28 percent and 14 percent respectively) are the ones keeping CIOs and IT directors awake at night. Overall, 93 percent of the sample admitted to being concerned over at least one aspect of their storage implementation.
In the Kingdom, Saudi businesses consider electronic attacks, downtime and sabotage as the main threats to their data. Of the 30 firms questioned in Saudi Arabia as part of the Hitachi Data Systems Storage Index, 20 percent admitted to not having a disaster recovery strategy in place, with 77 percent of them not having a remote disaster recovery site to handle data replication. One hundred percent of them, however, said disaster recovery and business continuity are very important business drivers behind their company’s investment in storage.
