A Shift in the Way Enterprises Store, Manage, and Protect Their Data

According to Frost & Sullivan, there has been a shift in the way enterprises store, manage, and protect their data to cope with the remarkable rise in data volumes.

The consulting firm found that these storage solutions expect to help enterprises maintain business continuity by enhancing storage, consuming lesser power, and providing customized solutions for various application sectors, depending on their business requirements.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Advances in Enterprise Storage Systems and Techniques, finds that the emergence of technologies, combined with industry collaborative efforts, has provided the ongoing momentum for this industry. The boundaries of enterprise storage are widening mainly due to its fast adoption, which also helps keep the technology dynamic.

The Frost & Sullivan research indicated that:

• Currently, only a handful of storage vendors can offer a comprehensive storage solution that enables compliance with standards, reduced downtime, cost containment, and provision of customized offerings.
• Major vendors are continually coming out with innovations in storage solutions that improve performance, simplify complex management tasks, and increase availability of heterogeneous storage resources. This is making the task for end users very difficult, as they are unable to make a quick decision. In such a scenario, enterprises could defer their purchase decision by five to six years to fully understand the intricacies of the solutions.
• The small- and medium-sized enterprises will be the most affected by the complexity of storage systems management and they are likely to come out with storage systems of their own. If that is not feasible, then they may strike a strategic alliance with larger enterprises to develop an effective solution.
• The criticality of storage management solutions in data integrity, availability, and protection makes it a top priority in IT budgets.

"Recent trends in the storage enterprise and storage domain reveal that there is a rapid adoption of storage area networks (SAN) and many enterprises are looking to migrate toward a virtualized platform," said Frost & Sullivan Technical Insights Research Analyst Gaurav Sundararaman. "The industry also anticipates numerous emerging storage technologies to be applied to crucial application areas such as healthcare, banking, law firms, and information technology."