Storage volumes are doubling every year. “Through 2003-05, IT organisations (ITOs) will face a significant budgetary challenge that will force them to dramatically reduce the storage total cost of ownership.
"To achieve this and avoid the nearly impossible task of doubling the number of people managing storage each year, ITOs must significantly increase the efficiency of their storage administrators,” says Kevin McIsaac, program director of server infrastructure strategies at the META group.
And, in an effort to increase this efficiency, more and more companies are considering outsourcing for their data storage needs.
However, according to Chris Moyle, regional program manger for Telco Service Providers at storage company, EMC, outsourcing data storage isn’t what is used to be.
“If you look back 18 months, before the economic downturn and dot.com collapse, there were providers building all these data centres around the world and there were e-commerce companies looking to make a buck,” he says. “The challenge for the e-commerce companies was: if we are going to be offering our services to the world and business explodes, how on earth are we going to be able to cater to the issues that surround that?”
With potentially a world market on a company’s desktop, scalability was a huge concern for e-commerce companies. As a result, there were a number of storage companies who came to the market offering outsourced storage services. The idea was that a company would run its business as usual, while all its data was stored offsite in the outsourcer’s data centre. That way organisations would not have to worry about coping with rapid growth.
However, this idea proved better than the reality. Companies simply weren’t comfortable with having their intellectual property stored off site. Issues of control, security, and trust outweighed any benefit this outsourcing model could offer.
Today, while companies still have the option to outsource their primary data storage, it is rare they do so. But other popular options have emerged. Now, when companies outsource storage it is more common they:
- Outsource their entire IT department—servers, applications, and storage included;
- Host the storage infrastructure within their own company and hire an outsourcer to come in and manage it for them; or,
- Outsource secondary data storage for disaster recovery purposes.
