Companies Spending $44 Billion for Unnecessary Copies – IDC

According to a new IDC Corp.‘s white paper sponsored by Actifio, Inc., The Copy Data Management Market: Worldwide Market Opportunity and Analysis, companies worldwide are now spending $44 billion on storage hardware and software to manage unnecessary copies of enterprise data.

The new white paper reveals details on the magnitude and scope of this problem, including the fact that – despite the deployment of deduplication technologies within conventional enterprise storage architectures – 85% of storage hardware purchases and 65% of storage software purchases are currently being expended in support of excess duplicate data.

The research is based on IDC’s market revenue and forecast data, as well as a survey of over 700 IT managers across 16 vertical industries worldwide.

Siloed business resilience and agility applications – from data protection and BC platforms, to archive, and systems to support both application development and analytics – were found to create up to 120 excess copies of production data when operated together, even with deduplication technologies deployed within these individual silos. Managing this excess now consumes more enterprise resources than the management of production data itself, in a turn of events that is at once remarkable and unsurprising to enterprise technology managers.

"Over the past 30 years, technologists have adopted multiple overlapping technologies to manage information, which has resulted in a tremendous amount of copying," said Laura DuBois, program VP, IDC storage practice. "While maintaining copies of data is essential for maintaining service quality, at some point this maintenance goes from being an insurance policy to paranoia. We now know what this paranoia costs, and the numbers may very well rock the industry."

Several data points illustrate scope
of copy storage market:

• Last year, more than 60% of all enterprise disk capacity worldwide was filled with copy data
• In 2012, 85% of hardware purchases and 65% of storage infrastructure software revenue in 2012 was spent on copy data management
• 78% of the 711 survey respondents expect to see more storage capacity allocated to storing data copies in the next 12 months
• By 2016, spending on storage for copy data will approach $50 billion and copy data capacity will exceed 300EBs
• By 2016, companies will spend 8 times as much on copy data by 2016 as they will on storage for big data and analytics
• Of the reasons for the growth in copy data, 70% of respondents cited the increased number of apps, while more than 50% cited more copies per app being created
• In the next 12 months, survey respondents expect increased use of data copies for app development and testing, regulatory compliance, multi-user access and long-term archival

Reasons for Growth in Copy Data
Q. You mentioned that the amount of raw storage capacity allocated for storing secondary data copies will increase in the next 12 months. What are the reasons for this growth? (n-556)

"The introduction of a purpose-built copy data management solution by Actifio has effectively created a new market segment – copy data management. IDC has placed this market segment inside storage infrastructure software – one of the core functional storage software markets," said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, IDC storage systems. "Actifio’s solution has serious implications on how businesses procure storage assets and in the process shut storage suppliers out of the secondary data copy management conversation."

IDC sized the magnitude of the copy data market both in terms of spending and capacity using its forecast models and tracker data. It complemented this data with primary research data based on a survey of 711 decision makers responsible for purchasing and/or managing enterprise storage systems. The market model forecasts copy data capacity and spend to grow at 23.5% and 5.4% CAGR respectively.

"It is an old story now that companies are faced with exponential data growth, much of it brought about by established storage companies intent on selling more disks and more storage software," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO and co-founder, Actifio. "The new story as illustrated by IDC’s definitive research is that the driver of this exponential growth is copy data. This validates what our users have been experiencing for years that by storing only one copy of data to use for multiple purposes you can save up 90% with Copy Data Management solutions like Actifio."

Full IDC white paper (registration needed)