Data growth compounding storage management issues - Datadobi report
New research from Datadobi and 451 Research suggests that more organisations are holding on to unstructured data, causing headaches for the planning, storage, and management of on-premise and cloud data
The Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Data Management - Disaster Recovery 2021 report found that data growth is the top challenge when it comes to storage management, ahead of other common challenges such as disaster recovery, migration, and cost.
Other challenges include managing data through third party or cloud providers, meeting compliance and regulatory requirements, storage siloes, new application growth, the lack of skilled staff, and being able to meet backup windows.
Further, 25% of respondents cite the high cost of storage as capital expenditure as a challenge, followed by high opex costs (22%). Further, 24% say they are having issues managing data that is stored in cloud and third party environments.
That challenge will only compound with time, as respondents expect data management to grow by more than a quarter (26%) in the next 12 months alone.
The report states, "When the data ownership trail is not clear, the result is the accumulation of redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data with no simple resolution. Today, the solution for most is simply to store this data in perpetuity, either on primary storage or possibly in backup or archive datasets.
The report also highlights issues surrounding the migration of data between different siloes.
"[This] means organisations should make investments in their data migration capabilities to move application data to the proper execution venue when it is active, and to an appropriate cost-effective storage tier when that data is less likely to be accessed.
The report also notes that organisations are looking towards hybrid IT instead of focusing purely on on-premise storage infrastructure. As a result, organisations much manage unstructured data across multiple locations. This means there is a need for data mobility, management, and protection that are 'rooted in clear and identifiable ownership.'
The report suggests that organisations should consider tools and platforms that can support a range of cloud and vendor offerings. This will enable freedom of choice, as well as lower prices and higher service levels from providers.
Datadobi CRO Michael Jack says that with cloud adoption comes efficient data mobility, and this should be automated as much as possible.
"Retention policies, data protection policies, and data disposition policies need to be clearly defined through partnerships between business data owners and the infrastructure owners who provide storage services to the business.
