Contingency Planning

Disaster Recovery, Data Archiving Top List Of IT Storage Considerations In 2008

December 12, 2007

Data archiving and disaster recovery are likely to dominate the storage related IT considerations of IT organizations as they plan for 2008, according to a survey of 472 IT executives across UK and North America.

BridgeHead Software’s Annual Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Audit 2007 reveals that IT executives listed archiving of file data (57 percent), email (55 percent) and database data (42 percent) as three of their top five storage related areas of interest over coming months. The other two issues within the top five were DR (59 percent) and backup (55 percent).

IT Departments Top Ten Storage Related Concerns:

1. Disaster recovery (59 percent).
2. File Archiving (57 percent).
3. Email Archiving (55 percent).
4. Backup (55 percent).
5. Database Archiving (42 percent).
6. Continuous Data Protection (26 percent).
7. Encryption of archived data (22 percent).
8. Storage management/ILM (13 percent).
9. Storage resource management (12 percent).
10. Secondary storage consolidation (10 percent).

“Disaster recovery and backup rightly figured highly on the list, along with continuous data protection -- which came sixth,” said Tony Cotterill, CEO and president of BridgeHead Software “There has been a clear movement over the last few years to make data highly available and rapidly recoverable to support electronic business applications as they became more key to an organization’s performance and bottom line and as disk storage prices have dropped. But now there is real momentum building up behind archiving as the data volumes on primary storage have grown out of control. Organizations have started to use archiving to reduce the cost of storing data, make electronic information more accessible to the organization, and impose IT standards for how data is managed.”

When asked what factors are driving interest in archiving, the top issue highlighted by the survey sample was disaster recovery (75 percent) followed by regulatory compliance (58 percent) and data growth (51 percent).

As already discussed, DR has long been high on the IT agenda. What the data shows and what may not be generally appreciated is that archiving technology can greatly improve an organization’s ability to recover operations in response to disaster. Multi-copy archiving of fixed content and historical data (the vast majority of an organization’s total online data) provides a cost effective alternative to the more expensive backup and replication which are often best reserved for use on active data only.

At the same time that archiving reduces the cost of storing data over the long-term and provides an alternative level of data protection, it also directly ensures compliance with the ever-increasing regulations surrounding long-term data storage and accessibility. In order to comply with new regulations and standards, IT departments are introducing advanced archiving technologies to manage data throughout its lifecycle, guaranteeing data retention, data authenticity, security, compliant media support and handling, and end-of-life destruction.