Most firms do not have enough pennies in the pot to effectively invest in data storage and disaster recovery protection, warns a survey.
Four in 10 of the 400 businesses surveyed said they lacked the budget to protect their data effectively, particularly in the face of ever-escalating demands for data back-up. More than half (57%) of respondents – all from companies with at least 1,000 employees – said their data stores were expanding by at least 20% a year.
Despite the growth in storage requirements, three-quarters of respondents said their data protection budget would remain flat or fall in 2010.
“Whenever I talk to enterprise customers they’ve got a conundrum: data is growing exponentially, at least 20% a year, so in a few years they know what they need to store will be doubling, and yet they are also told to cut their budgets,” said Jon Millls, EMEA managing director of Sepaton, which conducted the survey.
Data protection and disaster recovery were singled out as priorities for investment. On the data protection front, lack of funds was seen by 41% as damaging the service they were able to provide, prompting companies to consider investing in deduplication as a way of doing more with less resources.
“IT directors are between a rock and hard place – they need to do more with less, which is why they are turning to deduplication that allows them to use the same amount of hardware but store two, three or four times more data, yet the incremental cost is nothing compared to tape,” said Mills.
In terms of disaster recovery, 46% of respondents admitted they were not currently meeting recovery times and objectives consistently and were looking to invest in disk-based data protection technologies and cloud or managed service providers this year.
