A summary of enterprise storage trends
Website Enterprise
Storage Forum recently surveyed IT professionals working in businesses
throughout the UK in order to both gauge their plans for the next two years and
form a better understanding of their current practices. The resulting report,
published on the 21st August, contains a number of important
findings. Here’s a summary of what we found the most interesting:
Backups still aren’t
as important as they should be
Yes, when it comes to the importance of backing up data and
having an effective data
recovery plan in place, we’re biased. Whilst you’d be hard pushed to find a
more partisan opinion than ours, though, it’s still objectively correct to
state that data loss can and usually does adversely affect a company’s bottom
line.
In spite of this, the survey revealed that less than half
(45%) of respondents currently have a data backup plan in place. To make
matters worse, just 15% intended to make disaster recovery their main area of
technological investment over the next five years.
HDDs are still vital
Whilst flash storage is growing in popularity in enterprise
settings, it’s still not yet overtaken the humble HDD as the predominant form
of on-site storage amongst businesses with 60% of respondents stating that HDDs
were used as part of their storage infrastructure. In Comparison 55% use flash
media and SSDs.
But Cloud is king
Yes, HDDs were the most common piece of physical storage
present in IT infrastructures, but the Cloud, which is used by 65% of
businesses, was the most common form of storage.
What’s more, with just over 21% of respondents stating that
the majority of their technological investment over the next two years would be
dedicated to Cloud services, this figure is certain to grow.
Performance is more
important than savings… but only just
When purchasing new storage technologies, the majority of
decision makers (73%) consider performance. In comparison, 71% factor in
savings when choosing where to invest.
The three next important qualities were scalability at 51%,
improved security at 50% and the technologies ability to simplify management
infrastructure at 47%.
Companies face varied
challenges
When decision makers were asked what they considered to be the biggest challenge their companies would face over the next two years, responses were varied. 18% of respondents were concerned with aging technology, 17% with a lack of overall storage space, 13% with increasing costs and 12% with keeping their data secure and complying with regulation.