Many people would take an unreasonably long time to recover their data if their IT systems were to go down, and tape backups still have an important part to play. These are the findings of a survey carried out for Norwegian storage experts.
Proact (www.proact.eu) charts Norwegian companies’ attitudes towards information management every year. This survey, carried out by an independent body, involves telephone interviews with 200 decision makers and provides an insight into what Norwegian companies are thinking as regards storage and information management.
Seven in 10 respondents reckon that their departments are receiving enough resources to meet demands in terms of quality and uptime. Six in 10 are concerned about what business information employees can store using external cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud and suchlike. Fifty-five percent have refused to allow staff to connect private devices to company computers and software.
"A few respondents had no clear opinion on 'bringing your own device.' This indicates that the topic is being discussed widely and that good answers are being sought,"says Eirik Pedersen, Managing Director of Proact.
Willingness to invest data volumes are continuing to grow at a tremendous pace. No fewer than six in 10 respondents say that they will be increasing their volumes by anything from eleven to 50% this year (predominantly in the 11-25% category). The majority of companies resolve these problems by buying disks. The next most common solution involves deleting duplicates and old information, and demanding that employees remove private content.
"More surprising is the fact that one in 10 respondents say that they have no idea of how much growth to expect," Pedersen says. "This may mean that a fairly large number of Norwegian companies may have some unpleasant surprises coming."
Forty-three percent say that the amount they spend on storage has remained unchanged or been reduced over the past year. This is a clear change compared with 2011, when six in 10 found that their costs had fallen or remained at the same level. One in four did not know, and 20% saw an increase in excess of 20%. At the same time, 65% are planning to extend existing solutions for storage, backup and archiving or to buy new ones in 2013.
Two in 10 are considering investing in converged data centre solutions. Four in 10 have either started using external cloud services for data storage, backup or archiving, or are planning to introduce this within a short time.
"Surprisingly enough, this is a flat development compared with last year’s survey, in which this number had doubled since 2010. This shows that service providers still have some work to do on sharing expertise in order to remove doubt and uncertainty," says Pedersen.
Nine in ten respondents have carried out health checks on their storage solutions over the past year. Seven in 10 have crisis plans that are tested and improved at regular intervals. Only 10% would spend less than an hour recovering their data.
