IT Brief Australia - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
Story image
Rapid data growth becoming major business challenge
Thu, 19th Sep 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

StorageCraft has announced the findings of an independent global research study on experiences and attitudes of IT decision-makers (ITDM) around data management.

The research, commissioned by StorageCraft, reveals global concern about the business impact and risk from rampant and unrestricted data growth.

It also shows that the IT infrastructures of many organisations are struggling, often failing, to deliver business continuity in the event of severe data outages.

The vast majority (86%) of respondents believe that data volume will increase 10x or more in the next five years.

When asked about the potential impact of this growth, 80% expressed concern about the risk and the business impact it will have on their organisation.

The research reveals far-reaching business implications with respondents citing the following potential risks from not being able to manage data growth adequately:

  • 64% expect an increase in operational costs
     
  • 47% foresee an inability to recover quickly enough in the event of a data outage
     
  • 39% anticipate they will be more susceptible to security risks
     
  • 29% envisage that strategic projects will fail
     
  • 25% predict that revenue generation will lag

Organisations are already struggling with data growth and their ability to recover in the event of an outage.

  • Only 15% of respondents have an IT infrastructure that enables them to recover from a severe data loss within an hour
     
  • 40% believe it would take up to an entire day to recover
     
  • 25% estimate data recovery would take them days or weeks

Further illustrating the growing data vulnerability and threats to business continuity, there has been a 6x increase in recovery requests from StorageCraft Cloud Services DRaaS customers in 2019 alone as a result of ransomware attacks.

The Continuous Data Protection feature in StorageCraft's OneXafe, converged data management and protection platform, creates immutable snapshots of data sets, which ensured StorageCraft customers were able to thwart these attacks.

In addition, a recent TCO study reveals that StorageCraft's OneXafe scale-out converged solution has an almost 3:1 TCO advantage over traditional data protection systems, while the solution seamlessly integrates primary and secondary data, data management, security, and recovery.

"Despite IT managers' heroic efforts to maintain the performance and continuity of their IT infrastructures, we are reaching an inflection point where organisations cannot keep up with the volume and complexity of data management,” says StorageCraft vice president product and marketing Shridar Subramanian.

“The fact that a quarter of companies participating in the research are unable to recover from an outage for days or even weeks highlights how widespread this issue is. Businesses of all sizes and industries strive to flourish in increasingly data-driven economies. To succeed, their IT infrastructures require an economically viable and contemporary scale-out data protection system. StorageCraft's solutions ensure data is always safe, accessible, and optimised when needed and instantly recoverable in the event of an outage.

About the research:

A total of 709 qualified individuals completed the research study. All had the budget or technical decision-making responsibility for data management, data protection, and storage solutions at a company with 100 - 2,500 employees. The survey was fielded in English, German, and French in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and United Kingdom.