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Worried CIOs - lose sleep over storage and redundancy

A survey of European chief information officers shows they are concerned about storage eating into more of their IT budgets over the coming year, plus fear more lay-offs ahead
Written by Tony Hallett, Contributor

Two-thirds of European IT directors regularly lay awake at night worrying about security and downtime. Half realise they are going to have to change their IT strategy over the next two years.

Those are two of the headline findings from storage giant HDS, which polled 570 chief information officers in 12 countries across the continent as part of its HDS European Storage Index. Coincidentally, storage is one area where IT's top users are likely to see most change. Nearly all see storage as eating into more of their IT budgets over the coming year. It currently accounts for around 12-15 per cent of spending, according to recent figures.

At companies of all sizes data storage needs are expected to increase - by an average of about 16 per cent - though bosses in general expect not to get any more funds to meet this requirement.

The cited drivers for the growth in storage were, in order of importance: 'ensuring business continuity', 'improving data availability', 'responding to growing data volumes', 'reducing total operating costs' and 'meeting regulatory requirements'.

But good as this trend is for data storage vendors, looming over all this is the HDS Index finding chief information officers are still worried about redundancies. About twice as many were 'not at all confident' or 'not confident' versus those saying they were 'confident' or 'very confident' about not seeing any more lay-offs in their organisations over the next two years.


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