Researchers say the volume of digital business data to be stored is growing at a rate of 40 percent to 60
percent each year. So it makes sense that this explosion in stored files, logs and other data has
become one of biggest challenges to solve for large enterprises.
Gartner Research reported Nov. 1 that nearly half (47 percent) of its survey
respondents rank data growth as one of their three biggest daily challenges.
The other two are system performance and scalability (37 percent), and network
congestion and connectivity architecture (36 percent).
Sixty-two percent of
respondents report that they will be investing in data archiving or
retirement initiatives by the end of 2011 to address the problem.
A data retirement project is one that examines all archived and backed-up data
in a system to make sure it gets deleted from all storage nodes when its
expiration date comes up. Projects of this nature can take weeks or months.
In large IT systems, substantial amounts of data often do not get deleted on a
regular schedule, despite company policies. This is most often due to multiple
backup copies and mirrored systems that get passed over at cleanup time.
All those extra copies take up valuable space on digital disks or tape.
Other high-ranking IT projects that will be employed to address the issue of
data growth are data security from internal, external or hacker risk; storage
consolidation; storage management tools; and data reduction techniques.
Gartner’s research was conducted from June to August 2010 with representatives
from 1,004 large enterprises from eight countries.
For more, read the eWeek article Data Growth Now a First-Tier Challenge for Enterprises: Gartner.
