The most interesting aspect of the survey is that it sets the scene for enterprises to look to cloud-based, virtualized technologies, so that they can tackle the rise of ‘big data’, Infosecurity notes.
The survey for the research – which was conducted at last month's IP Expo event in London and drew in 151 interviews – found that a third of IT managers (35%) are struggling to manage their data storage. It was the second year running that this issue was raised by respondents.
In fact, despite the rise in adoption of cloud-based services – which allow organizations to rapidly provision or de-provision a service – HDS said the survey showed that 17% of respondents are worried about their ability to scale resources in order to meet demand, while 10% list achieving and maintaining efficiency as a primary concern.
Perhaps surprising, said the firm, is the number of IP Expo delegates pre-occupied with energy and cooling costs has halved in the last year (from 18% to 9%), while there has been an increase (from 10% to 16%) in the number of respondents that are worried about legacy technology.
Commenting on the results, Stephen Ball, HDS' head of UK, Ireland and South Africa, said that if enterprises are to address concerns about capacity, scalability and efficiency, they must transform data centers so that they can meet business demands.
“IT managers need to refresh data management strategies using a virtualized, automated, cloud-ready approach that allows data to become independent of the application where it is created. Only then can enterprises search, analyze and understand data so that it becomes a valuable information asset that can be utilized across the organization”, he said.
On the unstructured data front, HDS reports that more than half of respondents (57%) claim that unstructured data is the biggest headache for organizations, with delegates listing media files (22%), email (22%) and office documents such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint comprising (13%) the worst culprits.
In addition, researchers found the rise of structured data, such as SQL and access databases, had 30% of IT managers claim this was one of the biggest problems they deal with. Despite the growth in social media, it accounts for only 4% of IT managers concerns.
Ball says that these results show that concerns about storage continue to be driven by the growth of enterprise data.
“This is only going to continue into 2012, so it’s imperative organizations ensure they have secure policies in place to understand which data has the most value and needs to be stored in a way that is easily accessible for the business and to meet regulatory requirements”, he explained.
Further data from the survey revealed a growing emphasis on keeping sensitive data secure, with almost half of respondents (46%) claiming that the loss of data is their biggest fear when migrating information to the data center, followed by system downtime (32%) and cost (10%).