GlassHouse Technologies, the leading technology-independent provider of storage services and consulting, today predicted that data protection, storage security and virtualisation will prove business essential concerns for UK CIOs in 2006. These predictions are based on the business requirement requests of GlassHouse’s UK client base and recent end-user surveys on data protection and storage security.
Data Protection and Storage Security – the biggest compliance issues for 2006
GlassHouse commissioned a survey of UK C-level decision makers across the finance, retail, media, telecommunications, legal and transport sectors. The results illustrate that UK companies are well aware of the compliance implications of requirements like Sarbanes Oxley, yet interest (and budget) is now shifting away from additional IT expenditures to solutions that reduce costs, improve efficiency and simplify management.
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63% of UK companies quoted data protection as the most increased storage priority
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62% of UK companies quoted compliance as the main reason to improve storage security
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More than half of UK CEOs now personally handle the decision making for data protection
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82% of UK companies listed protecting the organisation’s brand, avoiding long-term business damage and avoiding regulatory breeches as the most important drivers for data protection
All UK companies should have formulated a data recovery strategy and defined the backup and recovery architecture. Yet the GlassHouse survey found that less than 60% have undertaken a full risk analysis, despite the fact that 83% of those surveyed said that the estimated cost of a full IT outage would cost their business anywhere between £26,000 – £176,000 per hour.
The combination of increasing pressures and costs of compliant data management mean that executives are inundated with compliance products, but too often gaps are left between correctly implemented and tested systems, and policies and procedures to ensure compliance on an ongoing basis. UK companies must now begin the process of looking at the people and processes associated with disaster recovery, data protection and storage strategies. Risk analysis will form the basis of this, but must go beyond the walls of IT into the core business areas to best address the gaps between the technology employed and the business processes controlling that technology. Too often these gaps account for worrying statistics like the fact that 34% of UK companies were not even aware of exactly how much money would be lost for an hour of business downtime.
“IT has worked with a “build it and they will come” mentality, which has worked for other back-office enterprise applications,” explains Jason Rabbetts, GlassHouse UK Managing Director. “Storage is a more organic compliance requirement however, and requires increased management as companies grow and use more advanced data services. This means that there must be more communication between business and IT managers.”
Awareness of general security risks outside of compliance issues seems lower however. 72% of UK companies still do not encrypt their back-up data and only 38% of companies considered non-compliance issues as significant enough to justify increased data security. GlassHouse predicts that storage security will continue to be on the IT radar but emphasis will be placed on greater education around what security procedures already exist across the enterprise and implementing policies to increase security without additional technology investment.
Virtualisation finally bumps up aggregation to become standard business practice
Many companies have viewed virtualisation as a pure technology solution to a core problem. The fundamental difference in how aggregation will address capacity issues is that it involves looking at how people assess these capacity problems.
“Most storage is only 50% allocated and of that only about 20% is probably valid data,” said Jason Rabbetts, GlassHouse UK MD. “There is more space and more data than companies are aware of and it should begin to be used more intelligently.”
GlassHouse predicts a real move toward aggregation in 2006 because:
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Storage requirements have accumulated project by project, not as a core service. Smart business requires more than consolidation to address the gaps between technology and business process and also in the data that sits in isolation between functional departments.
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Companies aren’t seeing a return on what they’ve spent in this area because consolidation required more money to be thrown at the problem whilst the operating systems weren’t moving at the same pace.
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Companies have put the business case together and factored in corporate governance requirements as the basis, signifying the real maturation and readiness of the market to use aggregation in the right ways.
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The industry will gradually move toward “storage and asset utilisation as a utility.”
About GlassHouse Technologies, Inc.
GlassHouse is the leading provider of independent services that help organizations solve the business problems of enterprise storage. From strategy through implementation, operations and customer support, GlassHouse partners with clients to achieve predictability and manageability in storage operations, enabling cost control, risk mitigation and increased service levels. GlassHouse clients include UBS, Exxon Mobil, Charles Schwab, Virgin Mobile, and The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. More information about GlassHouse is available at www.glasshouse.com.
