Data explosion has its problems for the enterprise

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 14 December 2011 16:37

The rapid shift of data centres to cloud-enabled services, mobile computing and 24x7 operations  is leading to unprecedented ways to create information that helps companies grow their businesses, but the changes mean many companies are now struggling to deal with the side effects of massive data growth, more demanding service levels for recovery and collapsing backup windows.

According to data protection company, CommVault's, it's a 'phenomenon' that requires a new strategy for information management, one that provides a 'seamless process from backup and recovery to archiving for data retention and easy, fast data retrieval.'

CommVault says its global IT storage spending predictions survey found that managing data growth, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, backup of virtual server environments and email/file archiving are the top five IT concerns facing end user organisations in 2012.

For Australian CIOs and their counterparts in other countries, CommVault says that managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) is the top budget priority for 2012, followed by network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications/software, data backup and recovery and backup of virtual server environments. 

And, CommVault's survey also found that for a majority of organisations in Australia these objectives need to be delivered with no increase in budget or headcount, with 54 percent of respondents indicating that no additional IT staff will be taken on in 2012, and 100 percent stating their budgets will remain unchanged, or decrease in 2012. 

Allocation of IT budget to data protection elements remained consistent with CommVault's January survey results, with over a third of Australian and global respondents planning to dedicate between 11 and 20 percent, and 43 percent suggesting they will allocate up to 10 percent.

According to Paul McClure - CommVault Asia-Pacific and Japan, Product Manager, IT budgets may be on the rise, but he warns that most organisations will have to weather the data deluge with their current IT staff. Of those surveyed, McClure says that 54 percent reported no expected increases in IT headcount in 2012, 16 percent expected an increase and 29 percent remained undecided on increasing their staffing in 2012.

CommVault says that the massive data growth is being fuelled in part by the continued adoption of server virtualisation as organisations consolidate physical servers in an effort to reduce costs. It reports that 82 percent of respondents are managing up to 250 virtual servers today, but an overwhelming 89 percent of respondents expect that number to increase in 2012.

Fifty-seven percent of the respondents polled came from organisations with between 500 to 10,000 employees, representing a variety of industry sectors, including government, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, engineering and retail, with nearly 50 percent of the respondents responsible for managing 11 to 75 TBs of primary data last year.

According to McClure, CommVault customers continue to embrace Simpana software to address their most pressing IT challenges while making the most of their IT budgets and alleviating the challenges that come with managing and protecting massive amounts of data.