75% of Enterprises Expect Data Protection Budget to Stay the Same or Decrease in 2010

SEPATON, Inc. announced the results of a survey of large enterprise companies with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect conducted in December 2009 – January 2010. Over 400 IT professionals across North America and Europe responded meeting SEPATON’s criteria. This high response underscores the top-of-mind nature and importance of data protection for enterprise data centers in the coming year.

Key findings include:

• Nearly seventy-five percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or decrease in 2010. Enterprises consider the need to improve disaster recovery and to protect data assets and to keep pace with data center growth among their top priorities.
• A key focus of spending in 2010 will be on disaster recovery, data deduplication, VTL, and other disk-based technologies. Enterprises are investing in disk-based data protection technologies that reduce total cost of ownership while increasing the levels of protection and service they can provide.
• Forty one percent cited insufficient budget to keep up with technology as the primary reason that their data protection falls short. Enterprises see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance.
• Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data. Forty-seven percent of enterprise respondents have more than 200 TB of data to protect. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have data stores that are growing at more than twenty percent (compounded) per year.
• Time and labor costs required to protect and manage data is significant. Forty-three percent of respondents need more than twenty-four hours to complete a full backup. Eleven percent needed more than twenty full time employees to manage their data protection.
• While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, most do not expect to be using tape one year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies (VTL and disk-to-disk) as well as cloud and managed service providers (MSP) in 2010.
• Disaster recovery is a key priority in the enterprise data center. Forty-six percent of respondents are not currently meeting their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and ROP) in a consistent manner. Seventy percent of respondents cited improving disaster recovery protection as their most important goal for 2010.
• Companies want longer online data retention. Only twenty-six percent of respondents are retaining their data online for 120 days. However, forty percent would increase their online data retention to 120 days if implementing deduplication made longer retention cost-effective.

“In 2010, enterprise data managers are looking to implement technologies that help them meet the challenges of protecting enormous volumes of data, dealing with exponential data growth, delivering higher levels of service and meeting more stringent regulatory requirements than ever before,” said Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing for SEPATON. “These objectives require technologies such as data deduplication, VTL and remote replication to backup and protect valuable information assets and store large volumes of data without adding administration cost, data center space or power requirements.”

To download the full survey results report (you need to register)