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.

Has your company lost vital data? You can book a free data recovery diagnostic and get a no-obligation quote for data recovery services on any type of media - from RAIDs to HDDs and servers - here.