Health IT – Getting it right!

The Current Economics Of Enterprise Data Security

By Lionel on July 26th, 2009

In Nov 2008, SEPATON, Inc., a supplier of virtual tape library and data deduplication solutions, conducted a survey of US-based companies to define and measure prevalent data protection challenges, business enterprise aims, and technology demands for enterprise data centers.

The analysis establishes that in 2009, enterprise data directors are anticipating implement technologies that assist them in meeting the challenges of protecting tremendous volumes of information, handling exponential data growth, delivering greater levels of service and complying with tighter regulatory requirements than ever before. Consequently, they’re moving away from conventional physical magnetic tape and embracing technologies such as deduplication and VTLs that return speedier performance, higher capacity reduction, enable more lasting online retention, and allow for modular scalability of performance and capacity.

The following bullet points provide summarized outcomes of the study:

1. A central focus of spending in 2009 will be on cost containment technologies for information security. Organizations are investing in technologies that trim down total cost of ownership by furnishing greater levels of data protection, moderate data growth, and scale capacity and performance.

2. In spite of prevailing economic pressures, almost 75 pct of enterprise respondents anticipate their data protection budget to either remain as is or increase in 2009. Organizations count the need to protect data assets and keep step with data center development one of their top priorities.

3. 52 pct of users who ranked their information security as inadequate named lack of budget to keep step with technology as the cause. Organizations view current data protection technologies such as data deduplication as crucial for sustaining service levels and regulatory compliancy.

4. Most Organizations are protecting exceedingly large and rapidly growing masses of data. 48 pct of enterprise respondents have more than two hundred terabytes of information to protect. 30 pct of respondents have information stores that are growing at a compounded rate of more than 30 pct annually.

5. Though a majority of respondents are utilizing physical magnetic tape today, fewer than 50 pct anticipate to be using magnetic tape twelve months from now. A majority of respondents plan to increment their utilization of disk-based technologies disk-to-disk, virtual tape library (VTL) appliances, or VTL gateways.

6. Data deduplication rates highest as the technology planned for deployment in the enterprise data center. More than 90 pct of respondents are either presently employing deduplication or would like to employ it. Of those who don’t have deduplication, 55 pct are apportioning budget towards this technology in 2009.

7. Server virtualization (VMware) is casting substantial strain on data protection environments. 74 pct of respondents report that VMware virtual environments significantly added to their data storage and/or the complexity of their data protection environment.

How have you fared with your data protection and storage challenges? What strategies did you come up with to handle these issues?