Saving data and saving money
As businesses create and gather more and more data, it stands to reason that improving backup, recovery and archiving will be a major focus for many companies.
Almost half (45 per cent) of respondents to the ZDNet IT Priorities 2011 Survey said this work is already complete, but a further quarter (24 per cent) said that such a project was underway, or planned for the next year. It's not a focus for everyone, mind you. In fact, for micro-businesses (less than 10 seats), more than half either don't have a full solution in place, or have plans to tackle it any time soon. What are they relying on in the event of data loss — blind faith?
(Credit: Phil Dobbie/ZDNet Australia)
For mid-sized companies (100-499 seats) it is a big issue — 38 per cent are pushing ahead with backup plans over the next year, on top of the 42 per cent with completed solutions in place. Larger businesses are in a similar position, probably working to an ever-wider brief as more and more devices emerge in the workforce, all requiring some form of secure storage and retrieval.
All other activities in the server and storage space seem to revolve around two words: cost savings. Server and storage consolidation is planned over the next year by almost a quarter of all respondents, and up to a third of mid-sized companies.
Virtualisation is helping. Half of the mid-sized and larger businesses quizzed in the survey have already completed work involving server virtualisation. A further third are pushing ahead with more work in this area over the next year.
Everything else is taking a back seat, even desktop virtualisation. Only 13 per cent of big companies have it in place, and only 22 per cent plan to implement it over the next year. Issues like UPS and cooling, all low on the priorities list, are less of an issue if you're cutting back on servers.
Cloud computing, of course, would help businesses to consolidate servers and solve the backup problem. Yet, as we saw in IT vendors need to be safe and affordable, cloud capabilities aren't high on the list of requirements from IT suppliers just yet. It seems, despite the cloud hype, that most companies still want to keep their data in-house, employing virtualisation to cut costs.
To download a copy of the IT Priorities report for 2011, please click here.