Almost 70 percent of corporate IT managers say their storage requirements are currently growing by up to 50 percent per year, according to research firm E-Mori. The survey, which questioned 153 IT managers, also indicates that data storage is no longer seen as an issue specific to the operation of the IT department, but rather a concern critical to the success of the entire business.
The report was commissioned to offer an insight into the storage needs of UK firms, but the results mirror recent findings in the US. "The UK market is quite sceptical [about storage] and it's nice to know that we're no different from the US," said HP's storage marketing manager, Matthew Harding.
The survey indicates the extent to which UK firms now rely on both the Internet and extranet to do business, and their need to plan and implement storage area networks (SANs) within their organisation.
For instance, 62 percent agreed that data storage was a significant business issue, rather than an IT problem, indicating that the financial and operational implications of system downtime are increasingly apparent.
Data warehousing was cited by 23 percent of respondents as the key driver behind expanding data storage requirements, with email and other forms of messaging accounting for 22 percent of volumes. Transaction processing was the most common form of data transmitted over SANs, according to 47 percent of respondents. This was closely followed by data backups (38 percent) and Internet applications (23 percent).
But the UK IT skills shortage does not seem to have affected the ability of firms to handle data storage in-house, with 82 percent saying they would be hosting their own SANs rather than outsourcing them.
